


filibuster vigilantly

by nugbug



Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: (im squinting), Alternate Universe - Pushing Daisies Fusion, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Healing, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Temporary Character Death, Touch-Starved, polyamory if you squint
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-07-21 07:29:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19998166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nugbug/pseuds/nugbug
Summary: When Sammy Stevens is 9 years, 3 months, 6 days, 7 minutes and 13 seconds old, he realises that he can touch dead things and bring them back to life.4 months, 2 weeks, 5 days and 19 seconds later, he learns that if he touches them twice, he'll make them dead again. Forever.It will take 25 years, several months, 1 small mountain town and more friends than Sammy ever expected to have in his life to do it, but things are going to get better. Sammy just doesn't know it yet.[come out here to love and support sammy stevens, no knowledge of pushing daisies required]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> its finally here!! the pushing daisies au no one asked for but everyone needs!! 
> 
> king falls has had me absolutely feral over the past like, four entire months, and one fateful night a month ago, mid-sammy-meta and crying, i had a burst of divine inspiration in the shower and realised no one's written a pushing daisies au yet. this thing was forged in the crucible of weeks of classes, field trips and a winter school to sydney, and also a years-long fear of productivity, but turned out to be more fun than i thought. who knew writing is cool!
> 
> dedicated of course to julian, who got me here in the first place, who proofread all of this and coached me thru baby's first ao3 publishing screen, and who inspires me by fostering pushing daisies marathons and screaming passionately into our king falls chat every 2 weeks. ur my dwayne the rock johnson, bro
> 
> title is from "build a little birdhouse in your soul", partly as a tribute to that pushing daisies scene, partly because vigilant filibustering describes sammy's entire radio career, and mostly because me and julian couldn't find an appropriate line from "untouched" by the veronicas. truly tragic. what we could've had. 
> 
> enjoy!!

The day Sammy realises what his hands can do, Jack and Lily are there to see it.

They’re nine, except for Lily who is ten, and very proudly explaining that this is the reason she should be playing the pirate queen and the others should be her, like, smelly crew of plank-walkers or something. Sammy, excitedly spying a justified mutiny on the horizon, is waiting for Jack to finish explaining why an age-based monarchy is an inherently rigged system, and pokes at a small dead moth in the grass just to have something to do.

As he watches, the moth’s broken wings knit themselves back together, and its antenna start to twitch. He’s pretty sure he sees a sixth leg grow back, but it’s hard to tell because it’s laboriously climbing to its feet and then fluttering away.

“Whoa, guys,” he interrupts. “Check this out.”

He crawls over to the closest dead beetle, and gives it a poke. It twitches, stretches out a creaky leg, then rolls over onto its belly and trundles off.

“Whooooaaaaaaaaa,” Jack says, mutiny forgotten.

“That’s freaky as,” says Lily. “You’re a weirdo, Sammy. Pretty sure that’s not science.”

“I don’t know, its like, a magic superpower or something.” Jack rocks on his heels, gripping his knees in an enthralled squat. “Like - healing magic! Like She-Ra!” He beams up at Sammy. “It’s cool!”

Sammy puffs up with nine-year-old pride, and they spend the rest of the afternoon playing Magic She-Ra Doctors and reviving small dead beetles that Jack collects and Lily conscripts to her Pirate Queen Of The Underworld Army.

Once, Sammy touches one beetle twice, by accident, and it shrivels up again, and refuses to move. Lily claims boy germs, and then Sammy and Jack chase her to test out if they’ll work on her too. They don’t, but Lily and Jack go home excitedly explaining why Sammy Next Door is their coolest friend ever, and the twice-dead beetle is quickly forgotten.

* * *

When it happens to Sammy’s dad, it’s less easy to forget. Sammy’s dad has a heart attack over the breakfast table, and Sammy doesn’t even think twice about poking a small finger into his shoulder to have him sitting up straight and blinking blankly around the room again. He also doesn’t think twice when his dad brushes his finger passing him a spoon, and drops dead on the kitchen floor for the second time that day, and final time ever. Sammy learns that his superpower works once, and the second chance isn’t very forgiving.

Sammy’s dad doesn’t live long enough for Sammy to know whether he’d be proud of him. But there’s a lot of things that Sammy’s hands do, over the course of his life, that he thinks wouldn’t sit great with his dad, personally, and sometimes he thinks he’s better off being spared having to know.

* * *

"So you can touch dead people and bring them back to life," Jack says. He pauses to wait for Sammy to confirm. Sammy nods.

"But touch them again, and they're fucked?"

"Fucked," Sammy agrees.

"Dude, that's cool as hell!" Jack enthuses, either too tipsy or too fascinated to care about the concept of mortality.

“Our lord giveth and our lord taketh away,” Lily intones balefully.

“I’ll taketh away from you if you don’t watch it,” Sammy jibes, because it’s already that kind of conversation, and Lily grins and tries to negotiate flipping him off around her beer.

They’re twenty-one, and they’ve just met again for the first time in 10 years, which is also the amount of time it’s been since Sammy talked to any other living person about his fucked up superpower, and somehow it feels like no time has passed at all. He’s never spoken about it for this long in his entire life. He’s actually only just convinced himself it’s real. The hard shell of cynicism he’s been carefully growing over the last few years seems to be melting away in the presence of Jack and Lily, and he feels closer now to being carefree and 9 years old than he has since - well, since the last time he saw Jack and Lily.

"It didn't work all the time though, right?" Jack remembers thoughtfully. "Remember that time I made you wake up that raccoon, and a few minutes later a pigeon just fell out of the sky in the exact same place? It wouldn't move, no matter what you did."

Jack looks dangerously like he's about to launch into some hardcore theorising, and maybe suggest some replicative experiments, but thankfully Lily catches him and is quick to change the subject. Sammy's more comfortable with these people than most, but there's still a line.

"So, Sammy Stevens," she drawls. "What's new, in the last decade? Gotta be honest, always kind of thought you'd been an imaginary friend."

"Always thought _you_ were a childhood nightmare," he shoots back.

Jack rolls his eyes, but not without affection. “I just still can't believe,” he emphasises, “After all these years. We ended up interning at the same radio station.”

Sammy grins, runs a hand through his shaggy shoulder-length hair. “I know, right? Never thought I’d see you guys again.”

“Dude. I spent _ages_ trying to find you. I was heartbroken when you moved away. I cried for, like, two weeks.”

“It was pathetic,” Lily agrees. “He kept a shrine to that shitty baseball you gave him for _years_."

"God," Sammy closes his eyes against the weird warmth rising in his chest. "The one I threw through your window when we were eight?"

"Our parents' window," Lily corrects, with too much satisfaction. "You were aiming for Jack's."

That tracks. His aim hasn't gotten any better since.

"Still can't believe you had the arm, to be honest."

"In his defense," Jack says, "he really wanted to come over to watch Treasure Planet. I'd break a window too."

"I actually seem to remember you were the one who bailed me out, Lily," Sammy smirks, leaning back in his chair, because he grew up being ribbed by Lily, and this is a game he knows how to play. "By pushing me down the stairs, if I'm remembering right?"

"So he'd be the victim, and they'd be forced to comfort him instead of kicking him out of the house," Jack says, shaking his head with grudging admiration. "Still genius."

"Listen," Lily sets her beer on the table, clearly torn between boasting and being caught out as a caring 10-year-old friend, "I had a lot of practice getting you two knuckleheads out of trouble. It was my gift."

"You were the one who got us _in_ trouble most of the time," Sammy points out, at the same time that Jack makes a matching indignant noise. "Don't think I've forgotten about your plan with the dissection frogs. Still exploiting my superpower, by the way."

"Oh, chill out, you know I would've rescued you if either of you two babies had started to cry," and Sammy does remember that Jack's last-minute panic about getting Sammy expelled had been the only thing that saved their science classroom from an army full of reanimated frogs that day. Lily waves her hand and takes a swig of beer. "Whatever. I clean up my messes."

"Sure," Sammy says. "And we're the messes?" Lily tips her drink to him in affirmation. Jack and Sammy exchange a look.

"We were such feral kids," Jack shakes his head a little wistfully.

"Were?" says Lily at the exact same moment Sammy says, "Lily still is."

Jack throws his head back and laughs, and it might just be the beer talking but it’s maybe the happiest thing Sammy’s ever heard. “Oh man, I remember this. Glad to see you two haven’t changed.”

“Just like the good old days, boys,” Lily says, throwing an arm around each of their shoulders and scruffing up the sides of their heads. Sammy almost manages not to flinch at unexpected touch. “Our little gang, back together again! We're too adorable. I need another drink.” She hops off her barstool and struts back to the counter, not waiting to check if they want anything.

Jack grins after her, then back at Sammy.

“Call me sentimental,” he says, “but I think I missed this.”

“You have no idea,” Sammy laughs, and he’s never meant anything more in his entire life.

Sammy's already spent years wishing he could find Jack and Lily from next door, and years more dreading what would happen if he did. He'd always assumed that they'd all probably moved on without each other, would barely recognise the adults they'd grown into. Or - Sammy admitted, rationally - that what they'd had maybe hadn't even been all that good in the first place. They'd been kids, after all - all they'd needed to get along were next-door windows, parents who tolerated each other, and matching 7-year-old desires to wreak havoc on the neighbourhood. They can't have been _that_ close.

For once, apparently, paranoid Sammy was wrong. He really just does like talking to them that much.

But he's enjoying ribbing them, too, so he grins at Jack and says, "So, two weeks, huh? Cried for that long?"

Jack barely even looks sheepish as he hits back, "You didn't?"

"Well, touché," Sammy admits with a lopsided grin. It was more like four months of crying himself to sleep with sporadic relapses on particularly lonely days in his teenage years, but he doesn't need to joke about that yet.

Jack swings a teasing kick at Sammy's legs under the barstool, and Sammy's carefully positioned himself far enough away that it doesn't land, but for a second he regrets it just a little bit.

"Dude, we should like," Jack says, with a look of dawning inspiration, "start a radio show together! At the station. I bet we can convince them, once we're there long enough."

“What, you me and Lily?" Sammy laughs. "You think other people want to listen to us shooting our shit?"

"Yeah, you wouldn't?" Jack challenges, clearly knowing Sammy can't pretend he hasn't enjoyed every minute of this conversation. "Please. We're classic."

"I don't know that childhood anecdotes about small dead animals are all that accessible," Sammy points out, but Jack's already waving him away.

"Sammy, the three of us? All going into radio? That has to be fate." And, yeah, it's just like the Jack he remembers to wholeheartedly believe in shit like _fate_ , but for once a tiny part of Sammy thinks he might have a point.

He decides to wait until Lily comes back, so that she can shoot down the idea for him, but realises with a weird feeling he almost recognises as _happiness_ that he wouldn't actually mind at all if she didn't. It's probably the beers talking, but maybe running into his childhood best friends in the streets of Orlando really was a tiny, miraculous little bit of fate. And this is definitely the beers talking, but Sammy doesn't even think any of them are going to leave any time soon, radio show or no, undead powers or no.

For the first time in as long as he can remember, Sammy isn’t worrying about what he can do with his hands. He doesn’t even feel like he’s already fucked things up. In the muggy Florida evening, with Jack tipsy and happy beside him and Lily sauntering her way back across the bar towards their table, an obnoxious comment already written across her face, he feels dangerously like absolutely nothing could go wrong. Against all his logic, despite everything he deserves, things might actually be starting to turn out okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i REALLY wanted this to be one long continuous work, but it got so long it tripped on its own hubris. ill at least try to end on nice bits so i dont keep leaving u all on sad cliffhangers. luckily the next 2 chaps are pretty much done so should be up soonish!
> 
> encourage me to keep going by telling me what ur fave bit was! i thrive on praise, and will try to put more of whatever u like in the next few scenes. theres still, like, a lot to go, so, we've got some wiggle room
> 
> as a fun aside, u should all know that i originally had sammy reuniting with jack and lily in the bar at 19, then i remembered they're american. also had to force myself to backspace and re-type "mom" at one point. this whole thing has been an exercise in geographical awareness, so thank u americans for expanding my horizons. we are all learning here!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two chapters in two days, look at me go!! this one's got some of my favourite bits, but heads up sammy's going to be very very sad for a bit. i promise the happy stuff is coming soon. 
> 
> i shouldve pointed out last chapter, this thing owes like, a lot to everything ever written by helloearthlings, who is already the master of aus in this fandom and who's had me on a king falls spiral for the past 2 months. her hunger games au kicked off the intense brainstorming session that led to this, and if u havent read that it actually ended my whole life, so, 10/10 would r&r. also @dinbird, ur daemon au motivated me to kick this thing into being published, so kudos to you too! god i love me some good aus. 
> 
> credit to julian @foxglade also, as always, just for general enthusiasm, inspiration and support. so keen to be the one writing fics that YOU can beta for a change! how the turns do table.
> 
> enjoy!

Sammy Stevens did not have a happy childhood. There are some things that even the most carefree first nine years can't set you up for, and having a literal hand in your father’s death is one of them. Deciding from age nine not to touch any other human being ever again is another. 

After he moves away, Sammy's life changes. They move into a smaller house, in a dirtier city. Jack and Lily are gone. Sammy's mother works more than she did before, and she's quieter, more snappy. Sammy's not sure how, but somehow she knows all of this is his fault. From the day his father dies, Sammy stops trying to hug her. And that's okay, because by a few months later she's stopped wanting to hug him either. 

Sammy's never actually quite sure whether his power still works, or whether it even did in the first place. Consciously, he thinks he probably imagined the whole thing. It's totally ridiculous, after all, if he thinks about it. But whenever he goes to test it out, something panicked and deadly certain rises in him and stops him before he can try. It's probably better, he muses, just to avoid the whole situation completely. Just in case. 

So Sammy spends his childhood sitting on his hands, and pulling them pointedly out of people's reach at family gatherings, and positioning himself very carefully in an orbit just out of everyone else's range. He hates the very idea of being close. He can't stand other people's skin on his, learns to avoid it like it's a plague that's deadly to him instead of them. The press of people around him makes Sammy feel like he’s suffocating, like he’s trapped in a room with spiked walls, except that he’s wearing all the spikes. It makes him _angry_. It’s as if they’re playing with him, daring him to hurt them. Sometimes he does hurt people, just to remind himself he can choose when to do it. Dennis Pittman won’t leave him alone for a few weeks in the tenth grade, so he shoves him hard against the lockers and punches his dickhead of a friend in the nose. It makes him feel powerful, like it’s only by his mercy and luck that they’re still alive. He has nightmares about that for weeks afterwards, and wakes up unable to breathe. 

He tries to date a couple of girls in highschool, but learns that this gets awkward pretty quickly when you’re trying to do it from 6 inches away. He eventually accepts he’s got to make an exception on the no-touch rule for dating, but even that doesn’t seem to solve the problem. Just holding hands makes him feel jittery and sick. Anything else is worse. The whole relationship feels wrong, like he’s forcing himself into a place he doesn’t belong, and he’s just waiting for the other shoe to drop and the consequences to hit. 

The truth is, he decides, there are some things that people like him just can’t have. People like him shouldn’t be touching skin with other people. It’s dangerous, it’s going to end in disaster, and that’s just that. And that works for him, honestly, because when he puts the blame on his fucked-up necromancer hands, he doesn’t have to think too hard about whatever else he secretly means by “people like him”. It’s not ever going to matter anyway, because as long as he’s vigilant, he’s never going to lay a finger on another guy in the first place. 

And really, all of this is okay with him. He’s actually done a decent job of adapting to it, all things considered, because Sammy Stevens might not touch people, but boy, can he talk to them. The things that Sammy can’t do with touch, he learns to do with a constant and ready supply of words. He can filibuster his way through anything - can come across as confident, as friendly, as intimidatingly abrasive, as bitingly cruel - and no one ever notices there’s very few actions to back them up. He’s got a great voice, people say. A radio voice. The gap between himself and everyone else is smoothed over with his uncanny ability to shoot the shit. He realises he doesn’t need to be able to touch people at all - he’s gonna get through life without that just fine. 

And then, Jack and Lily happen. 

* * *

There’s no way _not_ to be tactile with Jack and Lily, because they’re incurably tactile with each other, and as far as they’re concerned, he’s one of them. 

By the third day after their reunion, Lily is already slapping him on the arm to get his attention and laying her legs across him and Jack when she sits down. 

“You’ve got some Class A hangups about touching people, Stevens,” she observes, with characteristic tact, because of course she notices him stiffening and flinching every time a body comes near him. 

“Yeah, it’s probably something to do with the whole being able to kill them with a single finger thing.” He still can’t believe he can just stay this stuff out loud now. 

She snorts. “You can chill out, Rogue,” she says, and messes with his hair. “Wrights are unkillable. Also, gross. Wash your hair.”

Lily is refreshingly blasé about the whole problem, and Sammy’s discomfort does absolutely nothing to stop her from punching his shoulder in an ambiguously friendly way, and kicking at his ankles, and being generally as annoying about invading his personal space as possible. He refuses to tell her how much he secretly appreciates it, and enthusiastically returns her favour in kind. 

With Jack, things are different. The first few times Sammy flinches away from someone’s hand, or positions himself just out of their reach, he can feel Jack’s eyes on him, considering, with something gentle enough to be sympathy, but not patronising enough for Sammy to be pissed about it. For the first few days, he’s more careful around Sammy, moving slowly, staying in his line of sight, giving him time to move away. 

Then, the touches start. 

They’re small at first - sitting a little closer to him at the lunch bench, bumping him with his shoulder softly enough for it to be accidental. After a few days he’s fist-bumping him goodbye, high-fiving him for good jokes under the desk at work. Always he lets Sammy move in first, gives him a chance to move away or decline. Sammy can’t help but think that it’s all intentional, and has no qualms about accusing him of it. 

“Are you _training_ me to be okay with touching you,” Sammy says flatly one day, as they’re filing records in the station basement. Jack grins, a little sheepishly, but he doesn’t seem particularly embarrassed about it. 

“Hey, man, you seemed like you needed it. I had to acclimatise you to Lily and me somehow. Figured I could at least ease you in.”

“Aw, family induction. That’s sweet,” Sammy says, mockingly enough that Jack won’t hear the weird little tendril of warmth that’s unfurling in his belly about the fact that Jack thought of him. 

After that, Sammy starts to lean into it more. He lets Jack shift closer to him on the lunchseat, close enough that their thighs are pressing together, and they can play a game of footsie under the table. He leans a little into Jack’s side when he sits beside him on the bus, and one time drops his forehead to Jack’s shoulder to explain how tired he is. It starts out as a small thanks, something he knows Jack will appreciate, but before he knows what he’s doing he realises he couldn’t stop if he tried. He honest-to-god takes Jack’s hand one time during a horror movie he’s making them watch, and Jack laughs his head off and squeezes back right after Sammy makes him swear on Godzilla’s life that he’ll never tell his sister. And there’s one time, after Jack has ripped open the envelope telling him he’s got the scholarship that will let him stay on campus next semester, when Sammy throws his arms around him and squeezes with his whole body, all by himself, and Jack hugs him back and seems so full of happiness and maybe even _pride_ that Sammy can’t let him go for three whole seconds. 

“I’m just saying,” Jack is just saying, head on Sammy’s shoulder, leg tangled with his where they’re slumped on the couch, “I think I’ve been a good influence on you.”

“Uh huh,” Sammy says. “You got us drunk and now we’re watching _Notting Hill_ at 2am on a Tuesday night.” He’s not drunk anymore, he’s faintly tipsy and it’s wearing off fast, but he feels so soft and warm and content he couldn’t possibly be sober. 

“ _Exactly_ ,” hisses Jack. “I’ve taught you how to live the dream.” He might be a little tipsier than Sammy, but it’s a close call. 

“Alright, well, don’t get a big head about it.”

“Aw. You love my big head.”

“Not as much as you do.” Sammy swings a poorly-aimed kick at Jack’s ankle, and there’s a halfhearted foot scuffle for about three seconds that ends with Jack pinning Sammy’s ankle back to the couch. 

“I’m just _saying_ ,” he emphasises. “I don’t think you’ve ever touched another human being in your life as much as you do now. You were like a scared little deer when we met you. A cute little scared baby deer.”

“Oh, thanks, Thumper.”

“And look at you now! You’ve come so far.” He twists his head to look up at Sammy proudly. Sammy looks down and tries make his grin a little less stupid. Jack’s right. He’s spent his whole life terrified of his own hands, and now he’s finally starting to feel comfortable in them again, and no one’s hurt, and no one’s died because of him. And it feels so _nice_. Too nice, possibly, but he pushes that thought down, because sometimes he thinks he feels too much about Jack but maybe this is just what friendship is like when you let people touch you. Maybe this is just what he’s been missing out on all this time. 

“Dude, moving away at ten was bullshit. I wish i could’ve known you in high school. I wish I could’ve saved you from your repressed teenage self.”

Sammy snorts. “No one could save me from my repressed teen self, Jack. You’re getting the better version now.”

“Yeah, but I wish I could’ve known the old embarrassing you. Can you imagine how much dirt me and Lil would have on you? All the stunts you must’ve pulled, trying to get around touching pinkies with other people?”

“Lily doesn’t need any more dirt on me, thanks very much. And you’ve got enough too.” At any other time, these memories would be excruciating, but he can’t manage to muster up any kind of regret, tonight, here with Jack. He knows Jack’s bringing these things up to be affectionate, knows he’ll stop as soon as he senses Sammy needs him to. 

“You at _prom_ ,” Jack is groaning. “Trying to slow-dance without touching her hands…”

“Hey, I did _fine_ at prom, thanks! I was a total gentlemen. I wore gloves.”

Jack cackles gleefully. “You _didn’t_.”

Sammy quickly ends this line of questioning. “ _And_ I was a great dancer to boot. Probably way better than your meathead ass.”

Jack smacks him, affronted. “Excuse you!! I am One with the rhythm!!”

“Is that what they call it in the gym?” 

“That’s social profiling. People can be good at sports and dancing at the same time, _Sammy._ ” 

“Uh huh, okay. People can be socially repressed and still kill it on the dancefloor, _Jack_ . I was actually a relatively functional person before you came along and corrupted me. Just so you know, I was surviving _just fine_ without your weirdly-orchestrated physical contact.” He wasn’t, but Jack can’t prove it. 

Jack’s looking up at him, with a plotting expression that Sammy doesn’t like the look of. “Alright, fancy guy,” he says, unfolding himself and standing up. “Final exam. Let’s see what you’ve learned.” He holds out a hand. 

Sammy snorts and raises his eyebrows at the outstretched palm. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Prom dance. You and me, right now. The ultimate touch test. If you can do this, you can do anything. _And_ ,” he adds. “You can defend your title as Lord of the Dance or what the fuck ever you think you are. And you’ll graduate from the Jack school of societal functionality and I’ll shower you with accolades and our roles will switch and the student will become the master.” He waggles his eyebrows at him. 

“You’re ridiculous,” Sammy is scoffing, but already Jack is dropping his voice down a tone to something more genuine, and he’s adding, “But if doing this makes you uncomfortable, then this exam automatically becomes a test in boundary placement and you pass with flying colours and I’ll be proud of you for being so aware of your own limits.”

Sammy rolls his eyes and kicks Jack’s leg, to pretend like he’s exasperated by Jack’s theatrics and not gently glowing with the warmth of his presence and his stupid jokes and his constant need to look after him and Lily and everyone he meets. God. Jack is so full of light. “Alright, whatever, big guy,” he sighs, because if anything’s going to convince him to do this, its the gentleness with which Jack insists that he doesn’t have to. Also, the bottom of his stomach seems to be flying out of his body and he kind of feels like he could do anything right now. 

He takes the hand, and Jack’s face splits into an ear-to-ear grin. He does a dinky little curtsy with his ankles, and says, “May I have this dance?”

“Don’t push your luck,” says Sammy, as he puts his hands up on Jack’s shoulders. Jack puts his on Sammy's back. 

"Okay, great start," Sammy ribs, "Your hands are too high. Put them - nope - yeah, that's better. Jeez, where did you learn to dance?" 

"Excuse you," Jack says, without any right to, since he's only just found Sammy's waist and it's taken him about 3 steps to trip over his feet. He's still grinning, far too proud of himself for it. "Where did _you_ learn to dance?" 

"Believe it or not, I actually listened in some classes," Sammy jibes. "No, left foot - yeah, there you go." He pulls Jack around by the shoulders to keep them in line. 

"Were the classes _Footloose_ rewatches?" Jack smirks, and Sammy refuses to dignify that with a response. 

"Just keep it moving, big guy. Don't step on my foot." Jack's probably not a terrible dancer, actually. They're moving surprisingly in time with one another, and his hands are gentle on Sammy's waist. Elvis Costello is still warbling softly away in the background. This might be quite nice, Sammy thinks with some kind of flip in his stomach, if Jack wasn't specifically trying to rile him up. 

"So when do I get to dip you?" Jack says. 

"Absolutely not," says Sammy, as quickly as he can, but he's already given himself away with the smile in his voice. "No, Jack - no - HEY -" he protests, but he's already on his way down, and Jack is dipping him down and up again with far more relish and enthusiasm than he deserves. 

"Sorry, Sammy, compulsory class," he grins, with truly unbelievable glee. He whips them around to spin in a circle, and at this point Sammy's laughing so hard he has to grab the sides of Jack's face to hold him still. His hands are cupping Jack's cheeks, his face centimetres away; its the closest he's ever been to another person, and hes absolutely breathless with it. 

"You're an asshole," Sammy manages. "You football jerk." Right on cue, Jack chooses this moment to trip over Sammy's feet, and breaks his own ridiculous rhythm scrambling to get a foothold back. He's laughing too hard now; he dissolves in shaking peals, and presses his forehead down to Sammy's, and Sammy presses his up to meet it because he's laughing too, holding Jack tight while they both heave with breathless laughter. Elvis Costello sings softly in the background, but they're only swaying a little bit now, the song almost forgotten. And then they're standing there, forehead to forehead, grinning stupidly and breathing each other's air, and Sammy doesn't know what _it_ is but whatever it is he's going to explode with the happiness of it. 

"I never want to stop touching you again," he says, completely out of the blue, but it's the truest thing he's ever said, and it's all Jack needs to tilt his head forward and kiss him. 

For ten seconds, Sammy Stevens turns into a human firework. It's like every nerve in his body goes off, exploding from his belly with light and warmth and probably every colour. It is, in Sammy's limited experience of feeling things, the best thing he's ever felt. He takes a second to marvel at the fact that he's spent his whole life not knowing what this feels like, before his brain short-circuits and he runs out of coherent thoughts to have.

Jack pulls away carefully, and blinks at Sammy with an expression Sammy can only describe as _exhilarated._ And _exhilarating,_ if he thinks about it. 

"Is that - " Jack visibly schools his voice into something less hoarse, "Is that okay?" 

Sammy laughs, high and clear and breathless, so happy he barely recognises his own voice. He presses his forehead to Jack's again and closes his eyes, trying to get out the words _yes, yes, it was perfect, let's do this forever._ Sammy Stevens can't help but feel his whole weird life and baggage has been worth it, just because it's led to this moment. 

He's never moving from this spot again. 

* * *

“You’re moving. To San Franfuckingcisco.”

Sammy feels sick, sick down to his twisted core. Lily’s gaze is like ice on him, her arms crossed over her chest, but for once in his life he can’t even meet her eyes. He’s busy wringing his hands together, willing them to swallow each other, to disappear, to take him with them down into whatever void they came from. He hasn’t felt this bad since high school, since after his dad died. And now it’s all happening again. 

“ _We’re_ going. All of us. And not San Francisco, not necessarily. Wherever we can get a job. But – away, Lily, we’ve got to get out of here.”

Jack is doing the talking, like they’d decided on this morning. Lily’s going to be a hard sell, and she has much more trouble saying no to her little brother than Sammy. Sammy’s unspeakably grateful to him for it, like he always is, even if he’s having trouble looking him in the eyes right now.

“So what, you’re just gonna up and run from our whole life here because Sammy got freaked out by his own party trick?”

“Lily,” Jack says. “That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it? You’ve been doing this your whole life, Stevens! Newsflash! Why are we scheduling our little meltdown now?”

“Well, we just watched our manager die, for one, so,” Jack says testily, and god, Sammy can still see him, shocked glassy eyes and bones at angles they shouldn’t be, sliding back into place under Sammy’s touch, only to go limp again within the minute. He’d touched him twice. Like an idiot. He hadn’t thought, and he’d checked for a pulse, and he’d touched him twice. Brought him back to life just to kill him again.

“The asshole got himself hit by a bus! How is that your fault? He was dead anyway, you just gave him a bonus reunion tour to see him off!”

“Lily, stop it,” Jack warns. Sammy feels like he’s going to vomit. He’s wondering what the autopsy report will say, how they’ll explain away the fact that someone who apparently got hit by a 20 ton vehicle showed up with a perfectly healed, wound-free corpse. Uncanny. Unnatural. He wonders how he’ll explain it to the guys at work. 

Lily’s making this as difficult as he expected. “You're both being ridiculous. We have a life here. We have – friends, we have connections, we have _opportunities_. Hey, a manager spot just opened up, right! Oh, don’t give me that look, Jack, you know he was an asshole anyway. And excuse me being gross but like! This is our home! or whatever! And you’re gonna throw all that away to be some nobody in a big city doing a trashy morning traffic report?”

“Do you think we like this either, Lily? We don't have a choice. We’re giving this up to go somewhere people won’t be constantly associating us with a guy whose brain we watched bleed out on the tarmac. And where Sammy won’t be worried about – doing this again.”

“Uh, I think that’s a pretty easy problem to solve! You're not fucking dangerous, Stevens, just steer clear of undead people! I’ve actually been managing that one my whole life!”

Sammy shoots a look to Jack, trying to say, _please, it’s not that easy, please understand this is one of those things that I just can’t do._

Lily looks between them, one by one, Her face contorts into a sneer. “Oh, okay. I see. Is this Jack and Sammy, happy newlyweds, flying the nest to find a cute starter home and enjoy their marital bliss?”

“We’re asking you to come with us, Lily. Don’t be a bitch.”

“Well, I’m not going to big fucking city San Whatever, so jot that down.”

“Well, I’m not staying here, so jot _that_ down.” Sammy practically hisses at her.

She studies him, and something flickers in her eyes that might be concern. She opens her mouth, hesitant, and drops her voice down to the sincere one, the one she only uses when she’s run out of all other dialogue options, and she’s scared she’s about to lose a fight.

“Sammy. Please. You can’t just – cut and run on this. Don’t be dumb, none of this shit is your fault. We’ve got something good here. Don’t – let this take it away from you.”

She reaches out, and tries to take one of Sammy’s hands. It’s a rare and very un-Lily gesture, and any other time he’d make fun of her for departing from her usual arm-punch. But he can’t, he can’t touch anyone now, especially not Lily, especially not Jack. His skin is alive, his flesh is crawling, and he doesn’t know what he’ll do to her if she gets too close. He needs to get as far away from here as possible, away from Florida, to get away from these people who trust him and never look back.

Lily reaches out to him, giving him a chance, but he pulls his hand away. The look on her face almost makes him think it's not worth it. 

* * *

Things are okay, in San Francisco. They're at least as good as they can be. There's no Lily, there's a gaping hole where she used to be, but there's still Jack, kissing him on the forehead every morning, curling into his back every night, dancing annoyingly in the kitchen while they make dinner together. There's a house, and there's money. They don't love the work, but that's okay, because Sammy's working on putting as much space between that and himself as possible anyway. The less himself he is around people who aren't Jack, the safer everyone is. Life isn't perfect, but it's chugging along at a solid _okay_. 

Until, suddenly, it's not. 

Sammy sits by Jack's bedside for as long as the doctors will let him. He’s in and out of the room for three days, wired on vending machine coffee and panic; holding his limp hand, pushing his hair off his forehead, pleading futilely with whatever part of him is left to come back. He’s there when Jack’s machine flatlines, and he has ten seconds to decide whether he’ll leave this in the hands of the doctors and whatever shitty God is pretending to watch over them, or whether he’ll do what he knows he can, knowing it will change everything. 

It’s no choice at all. He presses a shaky kiss to Jack’s knuckles, and Jack opens his eyes. 

* * *

Everything changes, just like Sammy knew it would.

There are some things that get harder when you have a fiancé you can't touch, and those things turn out to be everything. 

As far as they know, it’s just skin-on-skin contact that’s the problem. They know this because Sammy brushed up against Jack's sleeved arm once, getting out of the car, and by the time his heart had started beating again and he had come back to himself, having leapt back a good five feet and choked on his own panic, a very much alive Jack was already pulling out a new notebook and determinedly scribbling JACK'S TOUCH HACKS on the first page. 

Jack's touch hacks are many and varied. He's insistent they can still spoon, as long as Sammy stays wrapped up inside a sleeping bag. He buys countless sets of gloves and leaves them strewn in convenient places around the house and car, so that he can hold Sammy’s hand while driving, and eating, and cleaning their teeth. There's an entire drawer in their kitchen filled with rolls of plastic sandwich wrap that Jack brought home one day after a burst of inspiration about Cling Wrap Kissing, which he was eager to try as soon and often as possible. 

They have not, yet, tried Cling Wrap Kissing. Sammy’s still working himself up to it. 

Right now, if Sammy's honest, he's still working himself up to existing. He feels like he's 14 years old again, like his skin is radioactive. Every move he makes feels like it shouldn't be allowed. He could kill Jack with a single touch, and he wakes up every morning thinking that he already has. 

Nothing they used to do is safe anymore. Jack keeps suggesting new ideas, filling up his notebook pages, coming home with new contraptions that he assures Sammy will be _fine_ , or at least risks worth taking, but Sammy doesn’t know how to explain to him that just being in the same house as him feels like tiptoeing along the edge of a knife. It would be so easy - a brush of a pinky in the hallway, Sammy's toe touching Jack's under their bedsheets, Jack's chin resting on Sammy’s head when they hug, and everything, the entire life they’d built together, would be over. In half a second, not long enough to even realise it was happening, Jack would be gone, and Sammy would be all alone with Jack’s life very literally on his hands, and no way to explain what he’d done. Most days, most times he enters a room to see Jack standing there, he has to remind himself to breathe. 

Neither of them are taking it particularly well, especially tonight. 

“Jack, babe. Are you gonna eat any more of that?”

The dinner that Sammy made for Jack is still sitting beside him, cold and almost untouched. He’s nestled in a sea of dirty coffee cups, papers and scraps of notebook strewn over the kitchen table, typing furiously into his laptop. On the screen is what looks like a very luridly-coloured forum, and Sammy can make out the sparkly shapes of some spooky animated emoijs, dancing in a line. 

“Huh?” he says distractedly, barely looking up from the screen. “What?”

“The dinner, Jack,” Sammy repeats. “Do you want any more?”

“Oh,” he says absently, still tapping away at the keyboard. “Uh, no. Not really hungry.” 

Sammy sags, for the tenth time this week. He’s been cooking more than ever for Jack lately; he’s holding onto it, as one of the few safe things he can still do for him. Jack doesn’t really seem to be appreciating the effort. 

“You have to eat something eventually,” he tries. “What did you have for lunch today?”

“Uh huh,” Jack says, clearly not even registering the question. He leans back in his chair suddenly, and looks over at him. “Sammy, I think I found something.”

“Yeah?” Sammy moves forward to collect his plate. He moves stiffly, tensely, reaching awkwardly over the table from its far side, keeping his elbows carefully in. Jack stills a bit, letting him reach over, and pushing the plate a little further away from himself so Sammy can lift it safely out of harm's way, but he clenches his jaw in a visible grimace as he does it. 

Everything is a trial now. 

“There’s this town,” Jack starts, and Sammy moves away and starts filling the sink, because he can already tell this is going to be a long one. “King Falls. It’s weird, Sammy. You wouldn't believe the stuff people say about it. I've got all these sources, there's this one guy who…"

Sammy lets him ramble, going back and forth between the table and the sink, collecting his coffee cups one by one. Moving in slowly, robotically, freezing to wait for a break in Jack's wildly gesticulating hands, lifting each cup carefully within Jack's line of sight. _Mmm hmm_ ing absently along to whatever he's saying, while concentrating on keeping the bubble between them safe and wide. 

Jack needs this research, Sammy knows. He's been housebound since the accident, on doctor's orders - no work, and strictly no rugby. He's going stir crazy cooped up all alone. This project is supposed to be giving him something productive to do, keeping him sane. It's good for him, Sammy tells himself, even if sometimes he worries it's having the opposite effect. It's good for him. Just let him have this. 

"... And then when I call the number, listen to what happens!" Jack punches in some numbers and thrusts the phone towards Sammy, dangerously close. Sammy recoils back. 

"Jack, jeez, can you - be careful," he snaps. Jack pulls the phone back a little, but his eyes flash in annoyance. _Be careful_ is most of Sammy’s vocabulary lately, and he's heading dangerously for broken record territory. 

"Just listen," he insists, but all Sammy can hear is slightly wobbly static and something that might be wind. 

"There!" Jack yells, "hear that?" 

Sammy doesn’t. He scrubs the plate in his hands harder. 

"Jack," he says carefully, "I think we need to talk about -" 

"I know it's kind of hard to hear," Jack is ploughing on, "but it's _there_. It's King Falls, Sammy. And there are more like that. It's like a supernatural hotspot." He takes a deep breath to slow himself down. He’s been getting more and more hysterical lately. "Sammy, I think there are people there like you. If there's anyone, anywhere, who'll know what this is and how to fix it, they're in King Falls. I think -" 

"Jack, there's no one out there like me," Sammy says with exasperation. Jack's frantically-searched blog results have not been convincing evidence. 

"You don't know that!" 

"Page 13 Google results and necromancy subreddits are not reputable sources," he says flatly. "Can we please just -" 

"I just think, that if we could go to King Falls, then -" 

"We're not going anywhere, Jack. We've both used up all our sick leave, and the station's getting suspicious as it is. Can we _please_ not talk about this tonight, I -" 

"Fuck the station, Sammy! This is about you! This is about me having an actual way to help!" 

"Jack, I'm serious." He puts down the mug in his hands and turns to face his fiancé. He hopes Jack can read the exhaustion written all over his body. "I don't want to talk about this right now. I'm doing - I'm going to be fine, we just need time. And I don't think you chasing ghosts and calling prank numbers is going to -" 

"You _know_ they're not ghosts, Sammy," Jack says, in a low and dangerous voice, and Sammy hates that he's touched on this sore spot but he already feels like he's let this go on too long, and he was always going to need to say something eventually. 

"I just, it's… I don't think it's good for you. Cooped up here all day, not sleeping, barely getting up to eat -" 

"Not good for me?" Jack looks incredulous, splays his hands out to gesture at the meters of empty space between them. "I'm trying to fix this! That's what's going to be good for me!" 

"Jack," he says helplessly, "I don't think you can fix this. This is just... me." 

Jack throws up his hands. "How would you know? You're not even trying to figure it out! You're just giving up!" 

He doesn’t say it, but Sammy hears an unspoken _it’s just like Lily said you would_ . It’s like a stab to his gut. He knows Jack is getting phone calls from Lily every other month. He knows they're probably saying _it's too dangerous, get out of there, come home. He's not worth it._ The only two people who’ve ever really loved him, who he’s ever really loved back, and this is what he’s done to them. 

“I just - Jesus, Sammy, what do you expect me to do with myself!” he explodes. “I can’t touch you, Lily’s on the other side of the country and won’t be in a room with us anymore, and it’s not like we have any other friends here to talk to. What are we gonna do, just fucking waste away from loneliness while we’re living in the same house? Do you honestly want that? What do you even _want_?”

“I just want you,” Sammy says, and he hates how pathetic it sounds. “However it has to be. Just, me and you. _Safe_.”

“Me and you? Like this? This isn’t you!” Jack yells, gesturing to Sammy up and down. “This is just - a fucking ball of paranoia and sleep deprivation on legs! You won’t let me help you! You’re never even in the same room as me!”

Sammy feels hot, angry grief rise in his belly. “Yeah, well, this isn’t you either,” he spits. “When was the last time you even had a conversation with me that wasn’t about King Falls, or your - friend on the phone?”

They stare each other down across the chasm of the kitchen, and the impassable stretch of tiles between them feels like somehow both the closest and the furthest away from Jack he’s been in months. Jack’s dark eyes are hot on his, knuckles clenched on the back of his chair. Sammy’s own hand is balled in a fist at his side, and he hopes Jack sees it and knows he’s not going to back down. 

Neither of them is ever going to win in an argument against each other anyway. They figured that out long ago, back when it was still a good thing. 

“I’m going to do this,” Jack says, with the unshakeable determination that Sammy knows and has come to dread. “Whether you help me or not. I’m getting to the bottom of this, I’m figuring out whatever this is, and I’m going to fix it. For us. You don’t have to help, but one day, you’re going to be better.” From the set of his jaw, the desperate and wounded glint in his eye, Sammy knows he's not joking around. 

Because that’s always what he did, right? Jack and Lily researched, the problem-solved, they dug deep to find the difficult answers to hard questions. Sammy had always just been there to dress the answers up, make them sound nice for the audience. 

He doesn’t know how to make this sound nice anymore. 

“Jack,” he pleads, helplessly, but he doesn’t even know what he’d say. It doesn’t matter, because Jack has turned back to his computer, lost to whatever rabbit hole is pulling him down into his screen, further away from Sammy than he’s ever been. 

He wants to cross the kitchen to him, to take his hand and pull him out of this spiral like he used to be able to do: to press their foreheads together and say _Jack, please. I’m sorry. I'm here. Come back to me._

But if he did, it would quite literally kill both of them. 

So he goes to the doorway, a gaping wormhole into the rest of the house, and looks at Jack across the emptiness of the kitchen, and realises he has absolutely nothing left to say. “Just - go to bed soon, okay?” he says finally. “Please get some rest.”

Jack doesn’t even look up from his computer. Sammy stands, spare, in the doorframe, for long enough to realise he’s not going to get a response. He turns around, back to the empty house, and goes to sleep alone on their couch. 

* * *

He'd thought that was as far away from Jack as he could ever be, but once again he's wrong. 

Two weeks later, Jack’s gone. Car running in the garage, packed trunk, headlights on, no Jack. It’s exactly the sort of scatterbrained thing Jack would do, until it lasts 12 hours, and Sammy still hasn’t got a phone call asking about snacks. 

He starts to panic after 12 hours and 3 minutes, and 13 phone calls, and 17 texts. He checks every room in the house, twice; drives back to the radio station, to the hospital, to the shops, before he checks the house again, because he's scared of what he'll find. 

His mind runs through a thousand possible scenarios where he might’ve touched Jack without even realising: where Jack came up behind him unexpectedly and brushed against him, where Sammy sleepwalked, where - worst of all - Jack gave up on this shitty existence and put himself in Sammy's path, quietly ending it himself. Where Jack’s body is lying cold and stiffening somewhere in the house because Sammy wasn’t watching where he was going. He stumbles through the house like he’s in a nightmare, switching on every light, expecting to see his glassy, staring eyes around every corner. 

He doesn’t find him. He calls everywhere - the station, both of their two friends from the dog park they used to go to, the staff of the coffee shop where they hang out sometimes. Eventually he even calls Lily. She ignores his first two calls, and yells at him on the third, and says he should be calling the fucking police, but actually nevermind, she’ll do it, and hangs up on him. He lets her. He doesn’t think his shaking hands can hold the phone right now, and hates himself for it.

The police don’t ask him a single question that he knows how to answer. They ask how he knew Jack, and he says they were roommates, just roommates and friends, and he knows they can tell he’s lying through his teeth. He knows they suspect he killed Jack, and they never ask him directly, but if they did he thinks he might have to lie about that too. 

Did he kill Jack? He _could’ve_. It would’ve been so easy. 

But there are no leads, no evidence, and eventually nothing left to do except stay put and wait, and for once in his life Sammy can’t do that anymore. He quits his job, he sells his house, he deletes everyone’s numbers from his phone, even Lily’s. He sits on a box full of Jack’s packed-up stuff, hands tucked tight under his knees, alone in the empty cardboard-boxed wasteland of the storage locker he bought, and wonders if there’s anything left in the world for him to do. 

He does the only thing he can. He goes to King Falls. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im gonna need to get yelled at to get the next chapter up, bc there's a few scenes im stuck on and it's shaping up to be a big semester. hang in there, theres happy stuff on the way!
> 
> comments always appreciated, if u tell me ur fave bit ill love u forever. cheers for reading!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> guys gals and nb pals, Its Ben Time
> 
> if anyone's wondering what happened to the pushing daisies thing where ned can only keep people alive for 1 minute before someone else has to die, it's not here, because i forgot about it. by the time i remembered i was 9000 words in and i couldnt be fucked to change it. also, i decided sammy's been through enough, let's just let him have this one win Okay
> 
> s/o to julian again for proofreading, validation, and supporting me illustrating my own fics, u top bloke. 
> 
> enjoy!
> 
> edit: im over at @marsupial-tapir on tumblr for anyone who wants to scream about character hcs or otherwise cry

He doesn't mean to stay in King Falls as long as he does. His plan, if he's honest, is to get in, get either an answer or Jack, whichever comes first, and get out, possibly from everywhere, possibly permanently. 

But the town is - against all of Sammy's instincts and better judgement - almost _charming_. Not that he believes in charms, because he still refuses to, Gwendolyn the Self-Proclaimed Witch be damned, but it's - it's quaint. Tiny little town, nestled high in the mountains, at the end of a winding forested road, where everyone knows everyone and waves hello at the Bent & Dent - the times Sammy's not being abused by a malicious soccer mom or a raving lunatic on live radio, he'd almost say it's sweet. It's like living inside a very weird, and sometimes hostile, snowglobe. 

There's still no Jack. Months go by, without Sammy ever finding a trace of him, without him even knowing where to start. He knows it's only going to be worth it to stay here so long, that every day that goes by without an answer is a day closer to giving up. But it's not like there's anywhere else to go. 

And, to his own surprise, there are other small reasons to stay. There's Emily, the local librarian, who he suspects is maybe the only other genuinely normal person in this town, and he's a little worried that if he leaves her on her own she might get another building burned down around her. There's Mary Jensen, who's decided she's his mother despite matching him for age, and who's hurting in almost the same way he is, and comforting her almost makes him feel like he's worth something. There's the local deputy, a dopey doe-eyed stringbean who's the most genuinely good-to-his-core person Sammy has ever met, and who decides Sammy is his Best Bud within minutes of meeting him and won't let him go for a minute after that. Sometimes Sammy thinks that if he ever did try to leave King Falls, Troy would General Abileen up the roadsigns so he could apprehend him on the way out and tearily drag him all the way back in again, and Mary and Emily would yell at him so soundly it wouldn't even be worth it. 

And then there's Ben. Earnest, idealistic, over-enthusiastic Ben, who reminds Sammy so much of Jack when he first met him that looking at him is like looking into the sun. He’s tiny, and full of righteously angry energy, and he’s all short limbs and floppy curls, nothing like Jack at all, but sometimes, when he’s lighting up with an animated rant about the _weird happenings_ in town for the sixth night in a row, half-jumping out of the chair beside him, that Sammy can’t stop himself from feeling a very annoying, very dangerous, very warm sense of _home._

And the thing is, the town really is weird. Not that Sammy believes in all their supernatural bullshit - he barely believes in his own - but the townspeople certainly seem convinced. Sammy’s not stupid enough to think about telling them what he can do, and he’s definitely not stupid enough to think it makes him belong. But sometimes he thinks, with a weird kind of comfort, that maybe if they did know, they might not hate him for it. Maybe he’d just be another weird thing on the street. 

It doesn’t really matter, because he’s going to leave soon either way. It’s only a matter of time the wrong person finds out about him, or about Jack, or before he realises he’s lost the game and just gives up. But it’s almost a sad thought. In another life, one where he had Jack here, and maybe Lily too, and Ben still beside him on the radio every night, _home_ and King Falls really might have been the same place. 

* * *

“Sammy. You’re my best friend. I love you, you know this. But you’re wrong.”

“Ben. I’m not going through this with you again. There are _no_ zombies in King Falls. Or anywhere, for that matter! Dr Rosenbloom is just a normal - creepy - guy!"

“Why won’t you let zombies into your heart!!”

“Because there’s no such thing as zombies to get in there in the first place!!”

Ben mutters something under his breath. 

“I’m sorry, Ben, do you wanna repeat that for the audience?”

“I said, spoken like a true Dr Rosenbloom!” Sammy blinks. “What!! Denying it all, taking the intellectual high ground, talking in that sad Eeyore voice… I’m just sayin'. If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you two were in cahoots.”

“I can promise you,” Sammy sighs, “I have _nothing_ in common with Doctor Jeffrey Rosenbloom." He really doesn’t. He checked out Rosenbloom in his second week after getting here, wondering if he could shed any light on his hand situation. It had been a dead end. Whatever Rosenbloom’s got going on is a whole other creepy kettle of fish that Sammy’s not thinking too hard about. 

“And you know what, frankly, Ben, I’m offended you’d even suggest that! I just think we shouldn’t be throwing around wild accusations. Especially at a tense time like this.”

He sees Ben relent, realising he’s taken the bit a little too far. He’s good like that; knows when to rein it in when he gets carried away with the banter. He lifts his hand, as if he’s about to pat Sammy’s arm comfortingly, but then visibly rethinks and pulls it back at the last second. Ben’s a very tactile person, but he’s apparently noticed Sammy’s touch hangups, and seems to be both working around them and not asking any questions. If Sammy wasn't loath to point out anything about himself, he would tell him how grateful he is for that. 

“Okay, buddy, I’m sorry. You’re right. We can move on. Actually, that leads me very nicely into something else I wanted to talk about tonight. Ladies and gents, it’s about the danger noodle situation.”

“Snakes,” Sammy says, tiredly. 

“My subject change, my rules, Sammy. Take a look at what I found in our own King Falls carpark on my way in.” He pulls something out carefully from under the desk and hands it to Sammy.

Sammy takes it without thinking. It’s long and leathery, and it looks a bit like a rubber snake, right up until Sammy touches it, and he realises it’s a real snake, lying very very still. It’s dead, until it hits Sammy’s finger, and its whole body flicks out of his hands as it whips suddenly back into life with a startled hiss. Sammy scrambles to grab it again, praying that it’s flopped back to stillness fast enough that Ben hasn’t noticed. 

But of course it’s too late. 

There’s a pregnant silence. 

“Uh, King Falls, we’re just going to take a quick commercial break,” says Ben, very slowly, not even looking down at the soundboard as he switches it over to ads. He’s staring at Sammy, flicking his eyes down to the limp, newly-re-dead snake, then back to Sammy again. 

“Sammy,” he says, his voice pitched almost too high for Sammy’s ears to register. “Hey, uh. What did you just do to my danger noodle?”

“Jack in the box Jesus,” Sammy mutters, dully accepting that that’s the worst sentence he’s ever heard in his life. He realises in this moment that he was born to suffer, and the entire world was designed specifically to make his life as difficult as possible. 

Well, what the hell. There's nothing else left to do. “So, uh, Ben. There might be. Something. I’ve forgotten to tell you.”

* * *

Ben takes it surprisingly well, all things considered. Sammy guesses that, living in King Falls, he's heard wilder things before. After a brief round of affronted spluttering about how he can't BELIEVE Sammy never told him anything, pretended to be a skeptic all this time when he was CLEARLY the weirdest and most occult thing in town - Sammy blatantly disagrees with this, Ben's heard Gwendolyn speak, and just because Sammy can do some kind of death magic doesn't mean Howard Ford Beauregard can too - his wounded pride gives way to anxiousness to make sure that Sammy is okay, that he feels like he can come to him for help. "We all accept you here, Sammy!" he insists. "You're not a freak in King Falls. Hell, not even Doyle's a freak in King Falls. You can come to me, or my mom, or Troy, or Ron, or Mary, or Tim, or Rose, or Archie, or Emily Potter, or Nancy Potter, or Mr Baumgartener, or Mr Sheffield, or Kingsey, or - yeah, okay, okay, you get it, _anyone_ any time to talk, okay??" When Sammy firmly assures him, albeit warmly, that he's not going to make any headway in that department, and politely turns down a hug, Ben's attitude becomes one of genuine, unbelievably annoying, curiosity. 

The questions start immediately, and they don't let up. On air, off air, over pancake puppies at Rose's, while livestreaming from the King Falls Annual Bass Tournament. Everything from "does it work on vegetables" to "OHH is THAT why you're so weird about high-fives?" Sammy feels like pulling his teeth out one by one. His cagey answers do nothing to satisfy Ben's appetite, and the little guy is even more persistent than Sammy gave him credit for. 

Sammy finally sits him down one night, exasperatedly switching them off the air, and explains everything to him, just to shut him up. He doesn't say anything about Jack, or his dad, or the manager in Florida. Just tells him about the bugs, about small animals, and about a weird experience he had with a stranger one time that made him reluctant to use or talk about his ability with other people. That's it. Just as much information as he needs. Ben listens intently, wide-eyed, clearly committing everything he's saying to memory. 

" _Now_ are you done? Will you stop trying to pick my brains about this?" Sammy pleads, when he's answered all of Ben's follow-up questions. "I don't understand how it works any better than you. And I really, really don't want to make a big deal out of it." 

Ben nods vigorously, wide eyed. "Y- yeah, Sammy, of course! Thank you for telling me all that. I respect your boundaries, if you don't want to talk about it we won't talk about it." He places a hand on Sammy’s knee, putting it down very slowly, on the thickest part of the fabric, like he's touching a nervous animal. "I promise, this is the last you'll hear of it."

But it's not. From then on, Sammy knows, Ben's up to something. More than once, Sammy catches Ben watching him out of the corner of his eye, sizing him up, and scribbling away in one of his damn notebooks. He's got some little project in the works, and whatever it is Sammy knows it's looming on the horizon and he does not care for it.

He just hopes it will come sooner rather than later. 

* * *

It does. 

" _Touch starvation_ ," Ben enunciates, pointing to the double-underlined word on the blackboard beside him. He's brought along an actual pointer and everything. "It's one of the biggest killers in Western society today." 

Sammy stares at him tiredly from his chair, where he's been strictly instructed not to move. Behind him, Troy is guarding the door for escape, nodding along with everything Ben says. 

"Just like food, water, emotional intimacy, stage musicals, and shelter, interpersonal touch is a fundamental human need." Ben's clearly rehearsed this script several times. Sammy has to hand it to him, his notebooks run a tight ship. "Yet in our culture, with its emphasis on values of independence, individuality and hypermasculine boundaries, the importance of this need often goes unsaid. Why?? Just like any other necessity, touch plays a crucial role in our lives. And without a healthy amount, our quality of life is doomed to suffer."

"I'm pretty sure not wanting to hold hands isn't an illness, Ben," Sammy points out. 

"Starvation, Sammy!! Read the board!! Star-va-tion!!" He taps along with the syllables, just in case Sammy isn't following. "It's insidious. It gets inside you and eats you up from within. Til all that's left is an old, sad, lonely, emotionally-neglected shell of who you used to be. Practically dead." 

Sammy doesn't bother pointing out that those words have described him precisely since age 10. "Is this about the time that I turned down that bear hug from Ron Begley? Because I'm not gonna die from politely declining a-" 

"Only a sick person would turn down a Ron hug, Sammy!!!" Ben yells. "Use your head!!" 

"Ron's like a big ol' lovin' papa bear," muses Troy from the doorway. "Aint nobody who'd say no to a Ron squeeze if they knew what kinda cuddle they was missin' out on." 

"Thank you, Troy." Ben straightens his sensible button-up shirt. "And no, it's not just about Ron. It's _everyone_. Sammy, I don't think you've had physical skin-on-skin contact with another flesh person since you arrived in King Falls." 

"Please don't say any of those words to me ever again." 

"It's not healthy! People need touch, Sammy!! That's science!! And heart stats!! Any god you believe in!!" 

"Also, that's not true. I hugged Mary that time." 

"AhA!" Ben yells with the savage victoriousness of a winning chess champion. "And I bet it was awesome!!" Admittedly, he's got Sammy there. Mary does give very good hugs. 

"We all got boatloads 'a heart inside of us, Sammy," Troy says gently. "Placin' ur hands on ur buds every once in a while is a way to take that stuff on the inside, and show it on the outside. You got a good heart in you, Sammy. It ain't fair you gotta keep it locked away and hurtin' all the dang time." 

"Thank you, Troy, I appreciate that," Sammy says, trying to be patient, "But really, I'm fine. Some people just aren't... tactile like that, and I happen to be one of them." 

That may well be true for some," Troy says solemnly, "and aint nothin' wrong with that. But I don't believe it goes for you, Sammy Stevens. If you weren't so afraid of hurtin' nobody with those magic hands o' yours, I bet your britches you'd be out there snugglin' with the best of them." 

"What we're _saying_ ," Ben jumps in, "is we're attacking this problem at the source. You're afraid of touching people because your skin seems to have life-channelling powers. So, we take away the skin. Troy? Commence Operation Sarcophagous." 

Ben pulls out an oversized bright blue hoodie from behind his makeshift lecture podium and starts to pull it on over his head. Behind him, Sammy hears Troy do the same. 

"Oh, I don't even want to know what this is," Sammy complains. He tries to push down a painful thought about how similar it is to what Jack did for him, albeit more platonic. And neurotic. "Guys. Thank you, I love you for this, but I really don't need it." 

"You need hugs, Sammy," Ben intones with the gravitas of a Supreme Court Judge. "And by God we're going to give them to you." He zips the hoodie up the front, pulls the sleeves over his hands. Tightens the drawstring around the hood so that it schloops inwards, leaving just a tiny patch of face and nose sticking out of a giant blue dome of a head. 

"What the fuck is happening," Sammy says. 

Ben nods solemnly to Troy and says, "Activating no-skin hug in 3, 2, 1…"

They converge on him from both sides, wrapping bright blue arms around him and slowly laying the sides of their cloth-wrapped heads on his chest and back. Ben pats his shoulder gently with a sweater paw. 

"This is truly horrifying. Thank you both." 

"Aw, you're welcome, co-best bud." 

"Ohoho, my friend, this is only Stage One," Ben warns, with just the subtlest peppering of glee. "Don't thank me till we're done."

"Excellent," Sammy mutters, glowering within his smothering coccoon of blue. He's outmanned, outgunned, and out of his power to argue. As Ben pats his head softly he realises, with a feeling that's not quite as sinking as it could be, that he might just have to consign himself to this fate. Maybe this is just his life now. 

* * *

It is. Two weeks later, they’re on the hotline with Cynthia Higgenbaum, who is being even more obnoxious than usual. In what even Sammy has to admit is a truly spectacular display of radio teamwork, Cynthia is being swiftly schooled, sorted out, and satisfyingly hung up upon. 

“Hell YES, buddy, BURRN!!” Ben whoops, as Sammy slams down the receiver, and from under the table he whips out a hand for Sammy to high-five. Somehow, without Sammy noticing, he’s already wrapped his whole palm in cling-film. 

“H- When did you -” Sammy tries, but gives up partway through. He doesn’t have the heart to leave him hanging. He gives Ben’s plasticky palm a slap, and tries not to give him the satisfaction of grinning too much. “Ridiculous,” he admonishes. 

“Only for you, my touch-averse bestie,” Ben shoots him a stiff finger gun through 9 layers of clear plastic. 

A week later, Ben is stepping on his toes and kicking at his ankles on their way out to the carpark. "If you kick back, you win footsie!" he taunts. Sammy refuses to indulge him in this particularly annoying mission, but he swings a kick at the space around Ben's feet as he gets in the car just so he feels like he has the last word. Ben pokes him in the shoulder all the way to Rose's. 

There are pokes, and hugs, and affronted slaps, and fistbumps, and pats on the head, and beanied heads on his shoulder, and impromptu TAA meetings with Ben and Troy for week upon week upon week. 

"TAA?" Sammy tries, already dreading the answer. 

"Touch Aversives Anonymous," says Ben quickly. "Now, stop moving, I'm trying to brush your hair." 

It's sweet, and incredibly annoying, and completely inescapable. Eventually, Sammy decides he might as well give his own back. He waits until Ben is at the peak of an "average height, medium rage" rant before he hits him with an "uh-huh, sure, buddy," and leans over to ruffle his hair. 

He watches with satisfaction as Ben's face wages a war between utter rage at being so belittled and patronised by a member of the Tall Bourgeoisie, and absolute, beaming, joyous pride. He splutters incoherently for a few seconds, and Sammy can't help but smirk and feel like it all might be worth it. 

At Rose's, he lets Troy pat his bare forearm comfortingly, and the next day he does the same back at him. He high-fives Mary in front of Ben to make him jealous, flicks Ben in the forehead a day later. With a little more coaxing from her, he hugs Emily hello, lets Ron Begley slap his back, shakes hands with Chet on his way out of the station; though that time he's careful to wash his hands afterwards. Lets Ben fall asleep on top of him, leaning all the way up against his side, head and drool on his shoulder, when they're over at his apartment watching movies together. 

It gets easier, and it gets nice. 

And when Emily goes missing, it's easiest of all. He even moves first, holding his arms out to Ben, who buries himself unhesitatingly in Sammy's chest. He heaves shaking sobs into him, and Sammy wraps his arms around his little body, holding on as tight as he can. His heart feels weak in his chest. 

"She's _gone_ ," heaves Ben. "She was right here, Sammy, I - how did she - I couldn't protect -" 

"Shhhh," Sammy murmurs, rubbing hands in circles on his back. Stroking his hair.

"I don't… know how….." 

"I know, Ben," he whispers, and he really, really does. "I know." There are too many echoes of Jack tonight, and always, in everything that's happening to him, and he can't bear it. History repeats itself again. 

He makes a promise in that moment, curled around Ben's shaking shoulders while Ben clutches him like he's his anchor to the world. He couldn't save Jack, but he's going to do every fucking thing he can to save Ben. Whatever it takes. He'll stay in King Falls as long as he needs, die here if he has to. 

He squeezes Ben tighter, and murmurs the promise into his hair, and it’s almost, but not quite, loud enough for him to hear. 

* * *

The beam of light slices through the sky, and the ship comes crashing down in a cataclysm of smoke and sound.

Ben is tearing through the wreckage before the dust has even settled, heaving aside strips of metal and rubble and calling Emily’s name. Sammy is glued to his spot on the grass, the automatic radio-voice part of him relaying everything he is seeing into his microphone while the conscious part of him stares and thinks _holy fuck. That clever little bastard did it._

And before he even knows it, Ben is pulling her from the wreckage; a tall, dark-haired, still-becardiganed body, sagging heavily in his arms –

And Sammy knows, before he’s even reached them, that it’s too late. The flop of her body, the odd angle of her neck, shoot through his nervous system and send a stone dropping to the pit of his stomach, heavy and unforgiving. 

The crash was too much. She’s gone.

He sprints to Ben, hoping and praying he’s pulled off another miracle. But Ben’s cradling her in his arms and sobbing, already, and pleading so quietly he must already know it’s a lost cause.

"Oh… Ben…" he starts, but has no idea how to finish. Ben lifts his head to look up at Sammy, brown eyes swimming with tears. There's a silent plea written all over his face. 

Sammy knows what he's asking without having to check. 

Jack’s face swims before his eyes for a second, slack and cold, surrounded by a vigil of beeping machines. Sammy pushes it back down again, bile rising in his throat. He can’t do this, promised himself he’d never do this again. 

He wants to say, _I know what this feels like. I know you think this is a solution, Ben, but it’s not, it’s not, Ben, it’s a trap, and it’s going to make everything worse._

It’s useless. He knows Ben well enough now to know he wouldn’t listen. Some faraway feeling twists in his stomach as he dully wonders whether Ben even planned for this - that Sammy’s only standing out in this field because his name is scrawled somewhere in Ben’s notebook, a panicked Plan B should things go awry. That maybe this is the only reason Ben’s letting him so close. 

But he can’t let himself think that right now, not when Ben is staring up at him, tears in his eyes, and Emily is limp in his arms, and Troy is gasping and taking off his hat beside him, and all of these people around him – who’ve tried so hard to bring her back - 

Who is he kidding. What does it even matter what he wants anymore? Isn’t Emily more important than him, than the ghost of whatever it is he still stupidly wants to get back? He can do this for her, for everyone who needs her here. If it’s a choice between Emily’s life and Sammy’s sanity, that’s no choice at all. 

And anyway, he made a promise to Ben. A world without Emily is a world that Ben doesn’t want to be part of, and that’s not one Sammy wants to be part of either. 

He looks at Ben, swallows hard, nods. Ben visibly slumps with gratitude, with relief, and moves aside to give Sammy a clear path. He watches, tension tight in his shoulders, as Sammy moves forward, leans down -

He pushes Jack’s face aside, thinks _for Emily_. Feels a door close inside of him. 

Then his finger is touching Emily’s cheek, and there’s the slightest tingle, a glow of orange under her skin, and he’s stepping back, out of the way, out of her way forever. 

There’s a few more moments of stillness, and Sammy can feel Ben holding his breath. Then Emily squirms in his arms, twisting a little as her bones right themselves. Her eyes snap open. “Who –?” she tries to rasp. “Wh- where am – ?” She barely gets a word out before Ben has her enveloped in a bone-crushing hug, sobbing into her shoulder, the rest of the world forgotten. Emily blinks in confusion. She spies Sammy over Ben’s shoulder, and her face relaxes a little in recognition. 

But Sammy is already backing away.

“Sweet mother-lovin’ son of a biscuit-eater,” Troy is sobbing. “You did it, Sammy. You boys brought ‘er home.” He tries to place a hand on Sammy’s shoulder, and it’s all Sammy can do to smile weakly and very gently shrug him off. 

No more of that. Not right now, maybe never again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I Read All Of Your Comments And I Cry


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im alive!! apologies for the delayed update, im writing this around 3 jobs, 6 uni subjects and a nightmare flu, and all ive done for an entire week is draw sammy with cats. sometimes, as they say, u gotta
> 
> im still struggling my way thru what was supposed to be this chapter, but ive been briefly possessed by the spirit of a victorian novelist and its now about 12k words, so im publishing the first half early. sorry to hold back on the comfort part of the hurt/comfort, but. its coming, i promise. i take this job very seriously, i will not let u down.
> 
> upon my fevered deathbed last week i reread all your comments and they gave me the strength to go on, so! this ones dedicated to u lot, u are wonderful and im so glad to bring u the emotional rubbish we all crave. shoutout also to the folks in the kfam discord, which i went on for the first time last week! ur all such cool kids and so sweet, even tho i had to go lie down for a week after the social pressure of the live listen. still gonna do the next one tho. worth it
> 
> and thanks to julian, for the playlist this time, u sick emo enabler
> 
> now drink ur suffering juice, children, thank u for everything, bone app the teeth

The problem with wanting things to go back to normal is there has to be a normal to return to in the first place. 

Sammy’s started to accept that his entire life is going to be a series of increasingly shitty fuckups, and if there ever was a normal to go back to, he’s well and truly burned the bridge to it by now. The aftermath of Emily’s rescue is a long, painful process of picking up the pieces, and Sammy knows now as well as he did when he touched her that whatever they’re piecing back together is never quite going to be whole again. But then, he wasn’t whole to start with, so he doesn’t see why he should be so disappointed. 

The point is, Emily wakes up, and she doesn’t remember Ben. 

And then she starts getting nightmares, and then she disappears off the radar for months, and when she reappears she’s tangled up in a godawful mess with Frickard, the gaslighting little worm, because her memory is shot through and she’s the easiest victim alive. She punches him in the face eventually, but still. She loses another year of her life, because Sammy couldn’t bring her back whole. 

Sammy can’t prove that his powers took Emily’s memory. But no one can argue that the correlation doesn’t seem just pretty damn perfect. He doesn’t know if it was because Ben was holding her when it happened, or because Sammy was upset with Ben and willed him out of her mind - he can’t think like that, he was mad at Ben but not _that_ mad - but then, how would he know? He has no idea how this works. 

Ben asked him about it, once, but something in Sammy’s face must have stopped him, because he’s never pushed again. He seems to be leaving Sammy alone about it now, giving him space to bring it up himself. That’s fine with Sammy. He’ll just never bring it up. Space is what he wants right now, more and more every day. 

It’s months before he talks to Emily in person, and he’s fine with that too. He doesn’t visit her, but the few times she calls in, he’s polite to her, as nice as he is to any of their guests. He doesn’t want her to be more upset, doesn’t want to make it look like he’s holding her at arm’s length. Arm and a half’s length, just to be safe. He figures she won’t notice anyway - with everything that’s happened to her, there’s no way she notices any difference from what their friendship was like before. 

Emily’s smarter than he gives her credit for. 

She corners him one day, in the station carpark, after she’s come in to visit them and he’s stepped outside on the pretence of giving her and Ben some alone time. It’s only half an excuse. He can tell they both want it. 

“Sammy!” she says, stepping in front of him on his way back in. He has to calm the spike in his heart-rate for a second, jumping a step backwards. Just out of arm’s reach. 

“Hey, Emily,” he says, relieved at how smoothly he can cover up the sudden panic. “You guys have a good chat?”

“Benny’s fine,” she says, with a little smile, but it twists slightly on her face. “But I - I actually wanted to talk to you.”

“Oh,” he says, hoping his voice registers as pleased surprise and not mild hysteria. “Really?” He’s still looking for an escape route. 

“Of course!” she says. “I always come in to talk to both of you. Benny’s - well, he’s Benny - but you’re my friend too, Sammy. And it’s been - “ she chews her lip a little. “Well. It’s been a while since - you know.” She smiles ruefully. 

“Since we had a chance to talk,” Sammy finishes, nodding. Oh, he knows. 

“A lot of things have happened, and I haven’t been able to see you, since the whole - business with the rainbow lights, and I wanted to say -” she looks for a second like she’s going to say _thank you_ , for bringing her back, which of course Ben has told her by now. But she’s looking at his face, and maybe she can see Sammy preparing to brush her off with a noncommittal reply, or maybe somehow she _knows_ a thank you is not what Sammy ever wants to hear about this, so she turns on a dime mid-sentence and instead says, “did it hurt? Bringing me back?”

Sammy stares at her in surprise for a second, his plan to step past her into the door suddenly jarring to a confused halt. “I - what? Did it hurt me... physically?”

Emily shrugs daintily. “In any way,” she says. “Did it feel… alright for you? I’m interested. I thought it might... help me, figure it out.” She’s watching him closely, and he suddenly feels like she’s asking something else. 

“It didn’t hurt at all,” he says, trying to sound honest. It’s the truth, at least. “Just a… little tingle. And a bit of a glow, afterwards. It was pretty non-eventful, to be totally honest. Nothing you need to worry about, as far as I know.”

Emily nods, but he can tell she’s turning something over in her head. She chews her lip a little. 

“Look, Emily, I should get inside,” he starts. “Ben’s going to be -”

But she steps carefully in front of him, blocking his path. He freezes, foot half a metre from where he could kill her. His heart pounds in his ears. She doesn’t seem fazed in the slightest. 

“Sammy,” she says, slowly, and there’s a weight to her voice that makes his panicked heart race faster. “I know you don’t want to have this conversation, but - I don’t know when else to have it.”

Jack in the box Jesus. He doesn’t want to be here. 

“Can we - not here?” he says tightly. 

She puts her hands on her hips, raises a skeptical eyebrow. “Where else, then?” she says, but it’s in the flat kind of way that tells him she _knows_ he doesn’t have an answer. She’s still gentle, though, even when she’s picking him apart, and her voice is kind when she ploughs on, “You’re my friend, Sammy. I - I miss you. I know you’re avoiding me because of - well, all of this, and I understand, it’s a lot to deal with, but - I’d really like to still be friends with you. I don’t want this to mean we can’t just hang out together any more.” She gestures to the space between them. 

“That’s - I appreciate that, Emily, I honestly do,” he starts, and he means it, he really does, even if he wishes there were a few more metres of space where she’s gesturing. “I don’t like this either, but - you’re right, it’s - all a lot to deal with. I think I just need some time, a chance to get back in the right headspace. We can talk about it later.”

She’s watching him closely, gauging his reaction. He knows within a second that smoothly brushing her off was the wrong move. Emily is smarter than that. 

She sighs. “Sammy, I know this is hurting you more than you’re letting on. I don’t know why, and I know you don’t think we’ll understand but - Sammy, we’re here to help. All of us, but especially me. If there’s anything you need to tell us, or if you just want to - to talk about it - please, Sammy. We - we want to help you.”

His heart twists a little in his chest. He doesn’t deserve these people, any of them, who he keeps hurting without meaning to. 

“Benny’s worried about you,” she adds. “He doesn’t know how to bring it up.”

“Benny’s _always_ worried,” Sammy points out, mouth twisting in half a grin. 

“Average height, medium panic,” she murmurs, and Sammy really does smile, remembering a time when his and Emily’s friendship was trading teasing insults of Ben over his head while he spluttered affrontedly at both of them. 

God, he hates this. He really does want to be her friend. 

“Emily,” he says slowly, quietly, because there’s no point in bullshitting her, she’ll see right through him. “If I touch you, you’ll die. One tiny accident, that’s all it would take, and all of this - your whole life - everything -” He gestures helplessly. “Do you know what I could even say to Ben? It’s dangerous, Emily. I don’t- think I’m built for that kind of risk.”

“It wasn’t like we were hugging each other every five minutes before this,” she points out wryly. “I’m not asking to hold your hand, Sammy. I just want to - to be able to talk with you again. And,” she adds carefully, with a slight frown, looking at him like she’s seeing deep into his soul, “I think we both know you’re upset about more than that.”

She really can see right through him. There’s no way she _knows_ , but then, Emily is a very good researcher. 

“I’ll be alright,” he says quietly. “It’s not something I need other people to help with.”

She nods, and for a second he thinks she’s about to lay a hand on his arm. She means it as a comfort, as some show of sympathy, but it makes panic rise thick in his throat and his whole body tense up. He can feel himself move back a step. She deflates a little. 

“I just wanted to say,” she says softly, sadly, “we’ve both been through a lot lately. And I think we both need a friend right now. So if you decide you want to talk, I - “ she looks at him, pleading. “Call me, okay? Any time. You know neither of us sleep.”

He nods, because that’s all he can do. It’s a lie of a nod, and she probably knows it, but he can pretend that he’s going to try, just to make them both feel better for a second. He watches her go, and thinks, _I’m sorry for this, I’m sorry about your memory, I’m sorry about everything._ He doesn’t even wave as she drives away. 

He can’t be friends with her, no matter how badly he wants to. The same way he can’t ever really be friends with Troy, or Mary, or _Ben,_ or any of the other people who keep putting their trust in him. The longer he holds onto things, the more likely they are to break. He’s learned by now that he can’t let himself have any of this. He’s just going to ruin it all in the end. 

He turns to go back into the station, and wonders how long it will be until he ruins that, too.

* * *

Sammy is seeing red. 

“If you,” he hisses, voice quavering with rage, “ _ever_ call this line again, you slimy little froggy fuck, if you lay so much as a _finger_ on Emily Potter, I’ll march down to the froggery myself and make sure you, and your granny, and all your sleazy little himinist friends wish you'd never been born in this shitty town. Don’t call again.”

The phone is slammed down on the console before Frickard even has time to whimper. Sammy doesn’t care, it’s not enough, all he can see is blinding, white-hot rage, and all he can hear is Frickard’s _just like you killed your sweet little boyfriend_ ringing hot in his ears. He wants to break something, break Frickard, break himself, and his hands are coming down onto the console before he can stop himself, and the world crashes down around him. 

He comes to himself blinking in the wreckage, watching the lights on the soundboard die. The last wires spark uselessly through the cracked face of the console. Again, again, destruction all around him. He’s done it again.

He’s already mumbling his way through a sentence about how he’ll fix it, he’ll pay for everything, he just needs to go outside for some air, but Ben stops him. His voice is like a strand of cobweb, a fragile thread cutting through the settling silence of the ruined station. 

“Sammy,” he says, and god, his voice is wobbling, Sammy has really scared him, “Sammy, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. Just - sit down.”

Sammy tries to stand up anyway, but his knees are shaking so badly he doesn’t manage it. 

"Dude, it's nothing," Ben is saying. "That's just - just stuff. I want to - talk to - are you okay, Sammy?" 

"I'll be fine," he mutters. "I just need some fresh air." He tries to stand up again. 

"I don't think you will!" Ben insists, but Sammy's not about to listen, not tonight. 

"I'm just stepping outside for a minute," he repeats. 

"Okay, then we'll talk outside!" Ben says. "Forget all of this, Merv will understand. We needed to replace it anyway. But Sammy - you have to -" He reaches out to stop him, stretching for his hand. 

"Don't touch me, Ben!" he snaps, pulling his hands away. "Don't touch me. It's not safe." 

"Sammy -" Ben scoffs half a laugh, then looks at him more closely. He seems to realise he's serious. 

"Is that - what this is about? Is this about your - your thing?" 

"It's just a bad day," Sammy mutters. 

"It's not, dude," Ben says. "It's not a bad day. It's a bad - few months. It's a bad _everything_." 

Sammy turns away. 

"I talked to Emily," Ben says in a low voice, because of course he did. "I know you're hurting, Sammy. I can see it too. I see it every day, I see you sitting over there beside me hurting all the time, but I don't - know how to -" 

He trails off in frustration, drawing a shaky breath. Sammy's not giving him anything. 

"Sammy, you have to talk to me. You're my best friend. I love you, whatever Frickard said, whoever you are, whoever you love, I _love_ you. Okay? I love you, Sammy, I'll never stop. I don't care about - any of this. And I - I want to help you. I want to help you be better. But you gotta talk to me, just like you made me talk to you." His eyes are begging on Sammy's, wide and earnest and imploring. 

Sammy balls his traitorous hands into fists in his lap. God, everything hurts. 

"Please, Ben," he whispers. "You can't help with this." 

Ben looks at him, desperate, then down at the hands in his lap. Realisation seems to slowly cross his face. 

"Can I?" he asks, moving forward, and Sammy doesn't have the strength in him to argue. 

Ben slides forward and takes his hands, so gently, so gently, Sammy wants to break with it. 

“Look at these,” he says softly, turning them over in his. They’re bigger than his, and more lined, and a little blood is drying where they crashed down onto the console. Sammy can still feel the ache ringing through his bones, but Ben doesn’t care. He holds them all the same, twines his fingers into Sammy’s so he can’t pull away. 

“I’m not scared of these, Sammy,” he says. “I never will be. You know why?”

“You should be,” Sammy tries, but Ben’s not listening. 

“Because they’re you, Sammy. They’re just you, and I could never be scared of you. You get that, right? You would _never_ hurt me. You never will.”

“Ben, I already have,” he insists, and he’s crying now, he can hear the tears in his own voice and he hates it. “Don’t you get it? I’m doing it right - right _now_ -”

“You’re not,” Ben cuts him off, holding his hands tighter, stubborn insistence tight in his voice. “Only because you’re hurting yourself first.” He shifts his chair closer, touching his knees to Sammy's. 

"You've never meant to hurt me, Sammy, _never._ I don't care what you think, you're wrong. But can you tell me why - why you think you would? I just want to understand, dude. For you." He squeezes Sammy's hands, holds his gaze. Gentle and scared and fierce. 

“I always do," Sammy whispers. "I never stop. Even when I don't mean to. I just hide, and run, I pretend I'm fine, like a fucking coward, and people get hurt, and there's nothing I can do about it." 

It sounds stupid, to his ears, pathetic and ridiculous, but Ben is looking at him brokenly, like every word Sammy says is hurting him. Sammy's heart breaks with all the things he's done to him, how little he's given Ben back. 

"I never - never told you,” Sammy whispers. "About him." 

"About - Jack?" 

Sammy nods. 

"I wanted to," he insists. "It wasn't you, Ben, I promise. I wanted to, every day, and I should've, the first day I got here, but I - I didn't know how the town would take it, especially knowing what I was, what I'd done, so I just - I said nothing, like a coward, I gave you nothing. I'm so, so sorry."

Ben shakes his head, brushing him off before he's even finished. "You have nothing to be sorry for, Sammy. You - I get it. I mean, you didn't have to worry, I was always gonna love you anyway, but I get why you -" 

"You don't," Sammy is shaking his head now, and it's so, so heavy. "You don't get it, Ben. You don't know what I've done." 

"Then what, Sammy?" Ben pushes, but his hands are still gentle. "What do you think you did?" 

He says it so softly, so carefully, like he's already forgiven him for it. Sammy can't let him, can't let him go on without knowing who it is he thinks he loves. He's let it go on too long already. He needs him to _know._

"He was my - my producer. My best friend, but not like you. He and Lily, all three of us, were - as close to a family as I ever got. They knew, about my - " his hands twitch in Ben's, and Ben runs a thumb over his knuckle, comforting and soft. "About this." 

Ben nods, hands still soft on his, cradling them in his lap. Sammy doesn't understand how he doesn't care, isn't _scared_ , but he needs to fix it. 

“Jack -” he starts, but even now, he can’t bring himself to say what happened. He takes a shaky breath. “There was a car accident. A head injury. Jack - he didn’t make it. I was - I was beside him in hospital when he -”

Ben makes a little broken noise, squeezes his hand tighter. 

“I had no choice. I had to, Ben, I couldn’t just let him - _die_ \- like that - when I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye, I -” he closes his eyes, willing the tears back, but it’s a losing battle. “He was my whole life, Ben. My whole world. I wouldn’t have been anything without him.”

He sniffs the tears back, swallows, tries to force his voice back into evenness. 

“Everything changed. We couldn’t - we couldn’t touch, and I was so scared, all the time, and he was so _angry_ with me, so upset that I wasn't trying, that there was nothing I could do. It was like living with a ghost. All he did was _research_ , and read, and make - calls, about this tiny little mountain town called King Falls, like it was gonna solve all our problems, like it would save us, he couldn't just _accept_ that there wasn't some cure out there for all of this, and then suddenly - he was gone. Just like that, in the middle of the day. Gone, without a trace. Not even a body, not a note, _nothing_."

He's breathing regularly now, but it's a steely kind of regular, the stone-cold kind of certainty that comes with knowing he's gone too far to take anything back. He's on this path now, and he knows where it's going to lead. 

"Lily always blamed me for it, I know. She - she never trusted me. She suspected, from the start, that I'd done it. And I don't know, Ben. It would've been so easy. Just one finger on his, that's all it would take, and he'd be gone, forever. Like that. I don't remember doing it, but you know what? I'd never even know."

He tries to throw his hands up, but they're still tangled in Ben's, and Ben makes a little murmur of disagreement, keeping him close. 

"And you know what the worst thing was?" He knows he's sounding hysterical now, but he doesn't care, he just needs to _get this out._ "It wasn't even the first time. I'd done it before, Ben. There was this manager, in Florida, I was there when he died. I - I touched him twice. I didn't even _think_." His breath hitches, his throat closing up again. "And then - when I was little - my dad -" He cant finish that sentence, has never finished that sentence in his life. 

Ben makes that broken noise again, pulls Sammy's hands closer to him. He's probably gonna crush his fingers soon, but by this point Sammy's lost all feeling in them. 

"God, Sammy," he chokes. "God, I - I didn't even know. And then I made you - with Emily -" 

Sammy can't say anything to that, just swallows and looks down at his hands. 

"You never let on," Ben wonders softly. "You just sat there, this whole time. Hurting. Dying. While I made you go through all of it again. And you never said a thing." 

He runs his thumbs over Sammy's knuckles, swallows hard. 

"Sammy, I am - I am so sorry. I'll never forgive myself for what I've put you through. You didn't deserve - no, listen to me, Sammy, you didn't. You _don't._ You're my rock, you know that? You've been my rock for so long. You've been there for me every time I needed you, even when I was trying to push you away. And I'll - I'll never forgive myself, for not being there for you too." He takes a deep breath. "But I'm gonna make it right, Sammy, for you, because you need it now." 

"Ben," Sammy tries to say, but his throat is so hoarse barely anything makes it out. "There's nothing left to make right," he whispers. 

"There is, Sammy! You're not - a monster, you haven't broken anything!" If Sammy could speak, he'd point out the shattered remains of the soundboard, smoking accusingly behind them, but he can't do anything except stare at Ben. Helpless, crying silent tears. 

Ben softens as he holds him in his gaze. He lets go of one of his hands so he can reach up to touch Sammy's face. Tucks a strand of hair behind his ear, gentle as can be. 

When he speaks again, his voice is soft. "You get that none of that was your fault, right?" he murmurs. "You didn't kill any of those people. That's not how this works." 

"They're gone, Ben," he manages. "Because of me." 

"They're gone because they died," Ben corrects. "Well, maybe not Jack. You still don't know that. But the others - they'd be dead whether you were there or not, Sammy. You gave them a second chance, which is more than they would've had without you. You gave them that." 

"And then took it away," Sammy insists. "I made it all worse." 

"Not with Emily," Ben points out. "You brought her back! You can do good things, too." 

It's not the right thing to say. " _Emily_ ," Sammy chokes, almost laughing with how ridiculous it is. "Her memories, Ben. I did that." 

"What are you talking about?" 

"I did something wrong. I don't know how, but I brought her back - wrong, and she was missing a piece. I did that to you. The one thing I can do, and I didn't even do it right." 

It's Ben's turn to almost laugh. "Sammy -" he scoffs. "You hear how ridiculous that is, right? You didn't do that. That was - the science institute, or the rainbow lights, or _something,_ I don't know, but it wasn't you. They're evil, Sammy, and she was there for over a year. And they _want_ to hurt me! You don't. It's, like, _so_ much more likely that was them, don't you dare try to tell me it was your fault. I won't believe you."

"But you don't _know_ that. You don't know how this works." 

"And you do?" Ben challenges. Sammy looks away. 

"Nobody does," he mutters. 

"Okay, so we'll figure it out!" Ben says, like he's picking up steam again, and the whole concept of that fills Sammy with dread. He’s getting ideas, Sammy can see him latching on to the trail, the same way Jack did. Sammy has to put a stop to this before he gets going. "We'll find out what this is, and we'll find Jack too. I know he's out there, Sammy. And I _know_ you didn't do any of this. I'm going to prove it to you." 

"Ben, no," he says. "I'm not letting you do that." 

"We're gonna find him, just like we found Emily," Ben promises. "It's my turn to be there for _you_ now. I'll research, I'll get a notebook -" 

Sammy is shaking his head. "He's _gone_ , Ben," he bites. "Don't -" 

"-And we'll get to the bottom of this! We'll find others like you, I know they're out there, I bet they can help. We'll get answers, just like Jack w-" 

Sammy finally pulls away, tearing his hands out of Ben's. 

"Don't you get it, Ben?" he snaps. "I don't _want_ answers. I don't want to know, about this shitty power, about what other terrible things I can do, I don't want to make this real. I don't want to do any of this anymore. I don't _want_ another Jack. I'm done. I want to take my stupid fucking power, and get out of this shitty town, and not have to worry about hurting people anymore."

Ben is shaking his head. "Dude, no, don't be dumb, you're not -" 

"No, Ben. I'm done talking about this. I'm done." He stands up. 

"Sammy, don't - hey, sit down. We're gonna -" 

There are no cards left for Sammy to play. It's time to show his hand. 

"Ben," he cuts him off. "I didn't resign my contract." 

Ben stills, mid-grab for Sammy’s hand, and Sammy watches the conversation drop out of his control. 

"What?" 

Sammy tries to make his voice gentle. He knows how hard this is about to be. "I called Merv, on New Years'. I told him I was ending it." He laughs quietly, trying to soften his words a little, seeing the distraught look in Ben's eyes. "Three years, Ben. It's a long time. It’s been good. But I’m telling you, it has to be over now.”

For the first time, Ben seems at a loss for words. He stutters, helplessly, and all he manages to do for a few seconds is gape. 

"I need this, Ben," he says softly. "You need this. You don't understand now, but everything will be better when I'm gone." 

Ben looks like he's going to cry. "Sammy, I - no. Please," he manages, choking on it. "I need you here. I can't do this without you."

Sammy can't believe that's what he's worried about. All the things he's seen Ben do over the years, all the ways he's grown up, and Ben still thinks Sammy's the better of them. If he only knew how proud of him Sammy was. 

"You can, Ben, and you will. I know you will. You don't need me. You're going to be something wonderful, whether I'm there or not." He makes it a promise, and he hopes Ben knows how much he believes it. 

The world's fallen apart around Sammy today; all of the things he's been most afraid of, for three entire years, have all come down on his head at once, all of his worst-case scenarios come to life. The place he almost called a home will probably never be safe for him again. But there's a weight lifting from his shoulders as he stands up, a lightness he hasn't felt in a long time. He knows what he has to do, and it's freeing in how final and awful it is. One last thing to destroy. 

"Cronkite," he starts. 

"No, Sammy," Ben warns, eyes welling with tears. "Don't you da - don't finish that -" 

But Sammy does finish that sentence, drops every word, all the way to the _Ben Arnold_ , and he hopes Ben can hear the affection in it, knows that Sammy's doing this for him, to keep him safe. 

Sammy stands up, walks out of the studio, and he doesn't look back. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> important songs for ep68:  
> \- agape, bear's den  
> \- cooling of the embers, missy higgins  
> \- all the things, which is not ep68, it's just sammy & jack in general but its in my head always  
> yes i made myself emo writing this, yes i do regret writing 3k words of it. kyle and eric really did that for us huh. the sick bastards


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> king falls fic chapters uploaded this week: 2  
> annotated bibliographies on the koala reproductive cycle completed: 0
> 
> i handed in an assignment late for this one, lads. was it worth it? You Decide 
> 
> enjoy!!
> 
> (ps im on twitter now, follow @nugbugnell for more soft king falls and academia screaming)

“Line Four, you’re live on -”

“I never said I thought you did it, asshole.” Lily’s voice cuts through the phone line like a shark through cold water. 

"And what a pleasure it is to hear your voice, too, Lily," Sammy replies nastily. 

"There's no need to take that tone with me, Stevens. I’m here for your sake. I just want to talk.”

"Oh, and you are off to a _great_ start." 

"Sammy -" Ben starts, exasperated. Sammy shoots him a dangerous look that says _stay out of it_. Ben, wisely, shuts up. 

"Listen, Sammy, I don't want to do this either. So quit interrupting, and I'll make it quick."

"Please do,” he bites. 

"Look," she says, and she's audibly trying to reel herself in, get her voice under control. "I'm. Sorry. That that little weasel outed you on the air. And I'm sorry if my research had something to do with that. But -" 

"How very sweet of you," he mutters. 

"- but you don't have the _right_ to go on live radio and tell people what I think. _Ever_ . Especially when you're wrong, and let me tell you, Mr I'm Too Good For Podcasts, your fact-checking leaves a _lot_ to be desired." 

He doesn't have fucking time for this. He has two weeks left with Ben, a town full of callers who keep trying to persuade him to stay, and six copies of his contract to avoid by the end of tonight. The last thing he needs is Lily Wright calling in and telling him how to live his life. 

But then, he's never been able to back down from a fight with her _._

"What did I get wrong this time, Lily?" he simpers, faux-sweet. "Not outed enough for you? Did I forget to mention any major life mistakes? Didn't get in a plug for Blue Apron while I was airing my dirty laundry?" 

Lily puts on the fake voice she always used to use to mock him. "'Lily _always_ suspected I did it. Lily _never_ trusted me. Lily thinks _I_ killed my _boyfriend_ because _Lily_ -" 

"Jack in the box Jesus," he snarls, ignoring the pain in his chest. "At least use his fucking name." 

"Jack Wright! I'm not afraid of it, asshole! And you're wrong! I don't think you killed him, actually! You just never asked!" 

Sammy scoffs. "Oh, that's funny, because as I remember, you made it _pretty clear_ that -" 

"I know your repressed ass better than anyone else, Stevens. I know you'd be too paranoid to come within a _mile_ of my brother if there was _any_ chance of hurting a hair on his perfect head. Give me some fucking credit where it's due, thanks, I know my team." 

"Former team," Sammy bites. 

"And whose fault is that! _You're_ the one who walked out on us and decided I didn't want to see you anymore. _You're_ the one who used your fucking secret power as an excuse to turn your backs on our family. Don't project your bullshit onto me, Sammy, and don't _ever_ assume you know what I think."

Sammy takes a deep breath through his nose, and presses the receiver to his forehead to steady himself. 

"And what do you think, Lily," he says, voice measured. "Please. Spell it out for our dear listeners."

"I think you're a coward. And an idiot. And you're not as powerful as you think you are."

He's about to point out that these are all things he had pretty easily figured out, thanks very much, but then she says - 

"And I think you should stop feeling sorry for yourself, and sign your goddamn contract."

Great. This is _not_ where he'd wanted this conversation to go. Sammy ignores Ben’s triumphant face, latching on to the rest of her words instead. 

"I'm sorry, _sorry for myself_ ? You think I'm leaving out of, what, self-indulgence? I'm leaving because I _hurt_ people, Lily. If you think that's -" 

Lily explodes. “Jesus Christ, Sammy! I don’t know where you get this fucking guilt complex from! For the last time, you’re not a murderer. And quite honestly, old buddy old pal, you'd barely even make a second-rate superhero. I can’t -” She takes a laboured breath, and Sammy can picture her hissing it out through her teeth, pinching the bridge of her nose. She's angry, but he still knows her well enough to hear the tiredness behind her words too. Her voice carries the same bone-deep exhaustion that his does, worn terse and weary through the same years of long, lonely grief. He hates it in her as much as he does in himself. 

It makes him want to make her angry again, just so he doesn’t have to hear it. 

“I just - I don’t understand why we keep needing to have this conversation. Can you please explain to me why you still think you need to be punished? Because at this point, Sammy, I genuinely just want to understand. I just want you to _talk_ to me. What else do I need to say for you to hear me out?”

“Silence would be a good start,” he says, and he hopes every word is dripping with poison. 

She starts to laugh, low and furious, and it’s exactly what he wants to hear. 

“My _god_ ,” she says. “My god. There’s that patented Saturday Night spite, just like I remember. You know, _Shotgun_ , if you could take your head out of your ass for just _one second,_ maybe you’d grow up enough to see I’m actually trying to be the big one for a change. I’m here to help you, you asshole, if I hadn’t already made that fact abundantly clear.”

“ _Help_ me?” he almost laughs. “Oh, yeah, Lily, you’ve been _real_ supportive. Just a pillar of love, all the way through.” He spits the words at her, and hopes that she’ll spit them right back. 

“Yeah, Sammy. I’m helping you. I have _always_ been willing to help you. It’s _you_ who -”

"Oh, please, Lily, don’t play the nice card now. As if you haven't hated me for _years_ ," Sammy snaps. 

"Newsflash, idiot, I loved you before you left. And, for the record, I've _never_ hated you for having superpowers. I hate that you can't fucking face the fact that you do, you don't even _try_ , and then when you get scared you use them as an excuse to abandon the people who care about you. No, don’t fucking interrupt me, you know I'm right. You've never even _tried_ to figure this out. You just lay down and accepted it like it was your heavenly burden to bear, and you never once even thought that it might be _our_ burden to bear too. But you know what? I don't care anymore, Sammy. I'm done. Let me just remind you, since apparently you can't figure it out yourself: people here love you, and they don’t need to suffer because of all your shitty baggage. So grow up, and don't walk away from this like you walked away from us. Sign your goddamn contract.”

She slams down the phone. 

There are a few seconds of silence. 

"Okay," Ben says. "So. Her methods weren't perfect. But I think she made some good points. Sammy, if you -" 

"Just take another call," he says, tiredly. 

Ben looks like he's about to argue, but Sammy won’t let him catch his eye. For once in his life, Ben gets the hint, and bites his tongue. Sammy knows he'll be hearing about this later tonight, can feel Ben’s narrowed eyes and set jaw on him, but for the moment he doesn't care. He doesn't have the energy to argue about it right now. 

Lily, as she always does, hit it on the head: he's done. He's done with contracts, he's done with fighting, he's done with Lily's hot and angry words ringing in his ears, tight with pain he knows he put there. He's done with people telling him they love him but refusing to understand, and then getting hurt because of it. He can't deal with any of this tonight. He probably can’t deal with it ever again. 

He lets Ben pick up the next call, braces himself for a night of halfhearted commentary and whatever tired jokes he can manage. Ignores Ben's furtive glances in his direction, and the contract he slips into his bag when he thinks Sammy's not looking. He'll argue about that later, if he can. He thinks, _two more weeks_. 

It's not long enough, and far, far too long. 

* * *

There’s only one way all of this ends, and despite what everyone keeps telling him, it’s not with him signing his contract. 

There's no point trying to explain it to them. They might ask, they might even listen, but they'll never understand. They're like four-year-olds clinging to his leg before their first day of preschool - they're good, and naive, and too much of both of those things to understand that him leaving is what's best for them. They think they need him, they think he’s in control here. They think the fix is easy. They think that he’ll sign his contract, and the problem will go away. 

It would be sweet, if it wasn’t so fucking sad. 

What they don’t get, what no one here will ever get, is that Sammy isn’t the sort of problem that can be solved by signing his name on a dotted line. There are no laws, no _legally-binding contracts_ , for people who can give and take life with the touch of a hand. There never will be. Sammy is a freak, a mistake. His ability is like a poison inside of him, a monstrous cancerous growth from some dark and depraved other world, one beyond where _radio contracts_ have any meaning. And he doesn’t have a clue where or what that other world might be, but he knows there’s an open gate to it sitting right on his doorstep, and he’ll be damned if that doesn’t just seem like an opportunity too good to pass up. 

So no, he doesn't sign his fucking contract. 

He packs up the sad remains of his shitty excuse for a human life, he waits until Ben's out of the station, and he drives away in the middle of the night to throw himself in the void, where he fucking belongs. 

And the void spits him right back out again. 

Not even hell will take him, he realises, as he speeds back again with his tail between his legs, sobbing to Ben and Emily over the phone. He’s not even allowed to die, and he hates that, but he hates himself more for realising that he’s not ready to anyway, maybe doesn’t fully _want_ to, even though he knows it’s what he deserves. 

But then he's being pulled out of his car in the town hall carpark, and there's no room to hate himself anymore, because he's already losing himself in Ben's arms. 

Ben yells at him, and sobs into his shoulder, and squeezes his hands and says he loves him over and over again, while Emily glares at him across the carpark, eyes brimming with angry tears, looking like she's about to slap him, or maybe hug him, but keeps her distance and says _don't you let go of him, Benny._

Ben doesn't let go. Not in the carpark, not the whole way home, as Troy drives them white-knuckled and teary-eyed to Ben's apartment, not when he dumps Sammy on the couch and burrows into his chest and stays curled around him until the sun comes up. 

Ben squeezes the life out of him, head pressed into his chest, arms tight enough to crush his useless bones, and for once in his recent life, Sammy feels like he's allowed to squeeze right back. 

Because honestly, at this point, fuck it. He knows he was supposed to die, he knows that he doesn’t deserve what Walt sacrificed for him to be alive. He knows that he’ll hurt Ben just by being here. But he’s hurt him by not being here too, and Ben's maybe the only person Sammy can hold right now. And so he might as well do it, just to make the world explain what he's still alive for. 

He cries into Ben's hair, and hugs him back, with all the strength his terrible poisonous hands have, and lets Ben tell him it's a good thing. 

* * *

There are months, after that, long and grey and empty. Sammy doesn't know how many, and he doesn't remember most of them. 

He moves into Ben's. He almost remembers arguing about it, briefly and uselessly - but then, Sammy has nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, so there hadn't been much to put up a fight about. Ben had moved him in, the day after the accident, carrying his small pile of stuff up from the car and saying _you're staying with me now, no further questions_ . And then, as an afterthought, _Parks and Rec marathon tonight. See you on the couch at 6._

Things are quiet, those few months. There probably wouldn't be much to remember anyway, even if his brain would let him. He's vaguely aware of Mary and Loretta dropping around casserole dishes, Ron and Troy calling in to help Ben clean. Things he would feel grateful for, if he could muster up the energy to feel anything. 

Mostly, he remembers things in vague, time-blurred snapshots. Ben’s spare bedroom wall. Ben’s ceiling. The dark corner at the edge of Ben’s TV. The cluttered inside of Ben’s tiny apartment, unchanging, for hours upon days upon weeks upon months. In the evenings, Ben’s concerned face, trying to get him to eat. And in the night time, creeping, insidious nightmares, darkness and pain, and Jack's almost-voice, reminding him what it’s cost him to be alive. In the mornings, blank bedroom walls again, asking him whether it was worth it. 

Emily calls him every day. Most days he has nothing to say to her, but she doesn't mind: she chats at him about the book she's reading, or her latest plans for the library, or puts the Jensen kids on the phone while she minds them in the daytime. She doesn't expect him to talk back, but she won't let him get away with not picking up. 

"At my worst, I wasn't allowed to talk to anyone," she explains to him once, voice wavering a little with the memory. "I won't let you do that to yourself, too." 

She’s made herself his carer, Sammy realises, a few months into this, and the only reason he lets her get away with it is that Ben’s beat her to the punch. Ben makes him eat, makes him get out of bed, makes him come down to the Ben & Dent to buy groceries, though he deals with the loose change when he sees Sammy’s hands shaking too badly to manage handing it over. Mostly, he makes himself as close as possible, filling Sammy’s bleak and broken world with constant reminders that he’s in it, and he’s not going away. He touches him, constantly. Sometimes he takes his hand, squeezes tight enough that Sammy can't ignore the feeling of his skin, and says _Still here, Sammy? We’re safe, buddy. Stay with me._ Often, Sammy's so empty he can't even think to be scared about it, doesn't even bother warning him off. There's not enough energy in him to care. He lets Ben hold his hand, gently brush his hair, curl up beside him on the couch and lay his head carefully on Sammy’s chest while he makes him watch Netflix. Ben would do it whether Sammy let him or not, at this point, and he’s not dead yet, so. No point resisting. 

Whole months pass that way, in Ben’s tiny apartment. Sammy doesn’t bother to keep track of how many it’s been. He wakes up every day, lets Ben hold him, goes to bed, and they both make it to morning again, day after day after day. It's not living, really, but he's not dead at least. Sometimes he wishes he was, but Ben keeps telling him all he needs to do is survive, and he's too tired to try anything else. 

So the months pile on top of each other, and he survives. 

* * *

Ben drags him out for New Years' at Troy's. It'll be fun, he says. It's tradition, he says. 

It is kind of nice, in an exhausting sort of way. At least, it's not as bad as Sammy expects. It's a house full of people who love him, and somewhere beyond the bleak, grey, tired muddle of his head, he knows that he loves them too. 

It's all just. Very loud. 

He manages to stick around for the countdown, puts up with some teary hugs from Troy and Mary, avoids a very loud and drunk Ron offering a midnight smooch to any male-identifying son of a gun who wants one, but by the time the new year is in he's had enough. He needs some quiet again. 

Ben finds him on the rickety old porch outside, staring up at the sky. He sits down beside him without a word, leaning a hand on his shoulder to settle himself down. 

"Shouldn't you be finding an Emily to kiss?" Sammy asks, as he moves over a little to let Ben in. 

"Already did," Ben replies smugly, and Sammy has to admit, he does bear the glow of the recently-Emilyed. "We get things done fast. Actually, she told me I should come and find you." 

Sammy hums a little, still looking up at the sky. The stars stretch high and deep above him, faint pinpricks on unfathomable black. They seem very far away tonight. "I think your girlfriend is trying to set us up, Benny." 

"Very possible," Ben says, sounding so cheerful he doesn't even point out the nickname. "We have had a few great chats about polyamory lately. But we decided we should wait until Jack's here to decide. Anyway," he ploughs on, apparently determined not to give Sammy any time to process any of that, "I think she just wanted to check up on you. Make sure you weren't starting the year off all on your own."

"I'm not now," Sammy murmurs. 

Ben smiles a little up at him, shivering a little in the chilly night air. He bumps Sammy's shoulder gently with his own. "How are you feeling?" 

Sammy shrugs. He's not feeling much of anything, but it's not a bad kind of nothing. The best he could hope for on New Year's, at least. 

"Mmm," Ben hums, getting it without Sammy having to say anything. He's good like that. 

He's quiet for a little bit, following Sammy's gaze up to the sky. Very far away, the fireworks show in Big Pine is loosing multicoloured flowers into the stars. If Sammy listens hard, he can almost hear their pops, watch the trail of sparks streak down over the jagged horizon. Gold, red, emerald green, turquoise blue, reflecting their glow onto the undersides of the winter clouds. Rainbow lights, but the good kind. The kind Jack used to love.

 _Four years_ , he thinks _._ Four whole years without him. 

He feels Ben shift a little beside him, the faintest swish of fabric that means he's turning his head up to look in his direction. 

"Hey, Sammy?" he asks. His breath sends a little puff of steam into the winter night, and the voice within it is hesitant, but brave. "Can you tell me something about Jack?" 

He really is on Sammy's wavelength tonight. Sammy looks down at him, a little surprised. He knows Ben's been itching to ask, but he's never pushed before. "Like what?" 

"I don't know." Ben shrugs. "Anything. Like, uh… okay, how did you guys meet?" 

"Oh, god," Sammy laughs a little, turning away. He thinks back, but he has to go so far there's nothing there. He can't even remember a time before Jack. "I don't even know. We grew up together, houses next door. Our parents were friends, I guess. He was just… always there. Lily too."

Ben makes a faint noise of surprise. Sammy really has told him nothing, if he doesn't even know that. Well, that's okay. Tonight's an alright night for talking. 

"I think my earliest memory of him is of Lily holding him out a window by his ankles," he adds thoughtfully. "But I must've known them already then, because I remember thinking it would be just like Lily to drop him, and being a little worried he was actually gonna die." 

Ben giggles, tipsy glee poking through. If he's sensible, he's probably entertained fears of Lily doing just that to him. 

"And whenever I picture him that age, he's in this, like, dinosaur onesie? He wore it _everywhere,_ for twelve days in a row once. Refused to take it off. It literally tore off his body like paper in the end, he was inconsolable." 

"I would be too," Ben says, nodding very seriously. Sammy bumps him softly in the side. 

"He kept silkworms," he remembers, feeling warm with the memory of it. The memories are flowing out of him easily, not at all as painful as he'd thought they'd be. "He had names for all of them. Whenever one died, I'd have to bring it back for him. Honestly, I think he just wanted me to hold them. He kept trying to bring them in for Show and Tell so he could introduce them to the class, and Lily kept saying, _no one wants to touch your gross zombie worms, Jack._ She still helped hide them from their parents, though."

He grins a little. "And this one time, Lily fell out of a tree, and Jack was the one who cried about it. All the way to the hospital. He made me come along too. Lily was just moaning up the front, complaining about how she only wanted the cool stitches, the red ones. She got them, too, and I never knew whether it was her pouting or his sweet-talking that did it."

Ben's grinning now, too. “So a real charmer, huh?”

“Oh, you have _no_ idea. He had my parents wrapped around his little finger. He’d show up at our door, asking Mr and Mrs Stevens if Sammy could please come over to play, and that was me up into our treehouse the rest of the day. Pretty sure they loved him more than me.” It’s probably true, but it’s still funny. 

Ben snorts, and he seems so contented, so happy to be hearing this, that Sammy has to look away. His heart hurts, but it’s the nice kind, gentle and unbearably, achingly fond. He'd forgotten how soft it was possible to feel. 

“He was so kind, Ben,” he says, and it hurts to say. “He had the biggest heart of anyone I ever knew. Even when he grew up, when I met him again. He was just… he loved everything. Even me. No one could slow him down.” He bumps Ben's shoulder again. “You’d know how it feels.”

Ben's already curled against him, huddled against the chilly night air, but he curls a little closer at that. He's looking down at his hands.

"I wish I'd been able to grow up with you," he says, a little wistfully. "I wish I'd known him back then." 

Sammy looks down at him, a faint smile playing on his lips. "You would've fit right in," he says softly, and he knows it's true. "Jack would've loved you." 

Ben bumps his shoulder again. "He still will." 

Sammy doesn’t have the strength or the logic to argue that point right now, so he lets it go. Tonight’s too nice to ruin with realism. “Maybe,” he allows. “We’ll see.”

They’re quiet for another few moments, but it’s a comfortable kind of quiet. Sammy’s run out of things to say, brief spell of emotions run dry, but Ben doesn’t seem to mind. He leans wordlessly into Sammy’s side, quiet and small and warm. 

“Hey, Sammy?” he says softly, after a few minutes. 

“Hmm?”

“I’m really glad you're still here. And I’m really glad I can touch you. I think Jack would be too." 

“He probably would,” Sammy smiles. “He always was a sucker for hugs.”

Ben’s gazing up at him again, all thoughtfulness and honesty. He looks like he’s considering something for a moment. Then he stretches up, leans close, and kisses Sammy very softly on the temple. 

"Next year," he promises. "Next year, that'll be Jack. I know it's not the same, but I'll do it until he can." 

Sammy looks down at him, and he's so stubborn, and earnest, and undyingly loyal that he makes Sammy's weak, tired heart swell a little in his chest. 

He gathers him closer, under his arm, lets him bury himself in his side.

"You're all I need," he murmurs, and drops a kiss onto the top of Ben's head. 

They settle against each other, and he knows they won’t say anything else. The night is chilly, and quiet, but there’s a warmth at their backs, and the faraway lilt of Troy hooting along to Missy Higgins, and Ron’s bellowing laughter. Ben might go inside soon, suckering himself back to Emily, but he’ll leave with a quiet word and the promise that he'll be back soon, probably with snacks. Sammy won't mind. He's as close as he needs to be. Against the horizon, he watches the last of the fireworks, flame-orange embers fading gently into the night. 

Somewhere out there is Jack, and he's still too far away to reach. He might never be close enough again. 

But there are other people here who love him, a warm house at his back, and an apartment full of Ben to go home to when the night's done. 

It's enough to survive for. He's surviving.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ur comments have kept me strong in the face of my withering gpa, id die for you all
> 
> on the topic of comments, credit for this chapter goes out to @psychodramarama who said they liked the childhood anecdotes a few chapters ago. i took that as a recommendation i should do more. u can tell i clearly needed a lot of convincing huh
> 
> the song that troy was dancing to is “new years eve” by missy higgins and it’s the ultimate banger for A New Years When Youre Feeling A Bit Sad But Youre Surrounded By People Who Love You So Everything’s Gonna Be Okay. i kno it’s probably a summer song and yall don’t do nye in summer but listen. its important to me, and it feels like itd be important to ben too
> 
> stay tuned for the next few updates, im sure ill be using them to procrastinate my enormous piles of lectures and readings so they shouldnt be too long lmao. comments always appreciated, please make my poor lecturers' disappointment worth it
> 
> oh and ps. s/o for julian, finally posting the fic ive been obsessively rereading on their google drive for 12 years. go read it, u can thank me later
> 
> thank u all for reading!!


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